[Find the Mercury's 25th Anniversary Issue (in print) near you by using this handy-dandy map, and read all of our anniversary stories here.—eds.]

It was the best of times. It was the weirdest of times. Like nearly every Portland Mercury news editor before and after him, Denis Theriault’s memories of working at the paper feel both rewarding and dizzying. 

Theriault worked at the Mercury from 2010 to 2015, as Portland’s population was multiplying and the sketch comedy series Portlandia was serving a parodied, overly-wholesome portrait of the Rose City to the world.

Those years also included the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street protests that spurred the prolonged Occupy Portland protest encampment downtown.

“I ended up sleeping in the office when we were on Ash Street, so I could be ready right away on that Saturday,” Theriault recalls of the final days of the Occupy Portland demonstration, about which, at one point, the Mercury provided round-the-clock coverage. 

As this publication celebrates a milestone 25th anniversary, former news editors helped trace its evolution from a punchy, often outlandish alternative weekly to its current iteration as… whatever the hell it is now. 

2000-2005

The Mercury launched in 2000 as a spinoff of its Seattle-based sister paper, The Stranger. Tailored for a Portland audience, the upstart publication was still finding its identity in a media landscape that already had an alt-weekly (Willamette Week), several broadcast stations, and the vanguard of local print news, The Oregonian. 

Phil Busse had the pleasure and misfortune of being the paper’s first managing editor. 

“We came in at a time when Portland felt very complacent,” Busse recalls. At the time, Vera Katz was entering her third term as mayor and getting a little too comfortable.

In one of his columns, Busse reported that Mayor Katz hadn’t stepped foot in Jefferson High for 11 years—signaling a detachment from the type of community engagement typically expected of Portland’s elected leaders.

As Busse remembers it: “I got a call the next day from her then chief of staff, Sam Adams, who said ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?!’” 

Stories like that came to embody the Mercury’s editorial approach. If the reporting made local politicians squeamish, that was probably a good thing, as long as it was true. Busse and the rest of the staff became hellbent on challenging the status quo. 

The former attorney-turned-editor took that to extremes in 2004 when he launched a tongue-in-cheek bid for mayor. 

“It wasn't meant as a way for me to promote myself or my ego,” Busse says. “It was just this idea of ‘anyone can run… so if I can run, you can run too.’”

To his surprise, Busse came in third, or as he puts it, “I got bronze!” [For more information, see “Bad Idea, Right?”]

The stunt felt milquetoast compared to other stories he and the rest of the editorial staff cooked up, like a drinking contest wherein different staffers were each assigned one type of booze to see which would yield the most outlandish antics. The night ended with Mercury founder and editor Wm. Steven Humphrey rubbing his bottom on the door handle of the Willamette Week office. 

Busse cherished the editorial freedom that came with the job, and came to embrace what he calls the merging of “entertainment and information.”

“I was allowed and supported and encouraged to have independent opinions,” he says. 

“Your new vegan restaurant—we'll review it with the same seriousness as The Oregonian reviewing the White Linen.”

Even in its early years of debauchery—before the internet became ubiquitous and transformed the media landscape—covering Portland’s news was still a grind. 

“For perceived slackers, we put in a lot of hours, whether that was to go for the punchline or putting together an investigative piece,” he says. “We had a brand of professionalism and that always felt surprising to outsiders.”

2005-2010

By 2005, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were in full swing. Portland’s beloved indie rock bands weren’t so indie anymore, and the city’s allure as a crafty, bike-riding and beer-brewing locale was catching on with national media. Sam Adams had graduated from a staffer in the mayor’s office to a member of the City Council.

The following year, Portland Police were under fire for the heinous death of James Chasse.

“The police beat a man to death while I was working there,” says Matt Davis, who served as news editor from 2006 to 2010, following the co-editorship of Scott Moore and Amy Jenniges. 

Chasse, 42, was experiencing a mental health crisis when he was restrained by police, who later beat him unconscious, breaking more than 20 bones in his body. Chasse died in custody while police were transporting him to a hospital.

“At the time, they did fire a police officer over the death of [Chasse],” Davis recalls. “The Chasse death and the coverage of that was a significant part of my reporting there. I enjoyed really digging into that and the reporting that led to significant change.”

Davis was also notorious for clapping back at readers via the comments section, back when the Mercury still had one. “I told a troll on the blog to fuck off,” Davis recalls. “It was very kind of [Steve] not to fire me.”

There were brighter moments, like interviews with Anthony Bourdain and Gus Van Sant, and an out-of-state weekend staff “retreat.”

“I think I’d been there about three weeks when Steve took the entire editorial staff to Las Vegas for a weekend,” Davis recalls. “I shared a room with the music editor at the time. He bought a bunch of bouncy rubber balls and bounced them up and down the strip. He also won a fair amount of money at the casinos.”

Davis, originally from Southeast London, now runs a public relations firm out of New York.

“All of the staff were really, really interesting,” he recounts. “Bright. Unconventional.”

Davis, in particular, was unrelenting. 

“Steve encouraged us to be savage dogs. I was a psychopath,” he divulges.

“Steve encouraged it, but backed me every time. He always stood up for me. That’s what Portland needs. It needs a fearless instrument of journalism.”

2010-2015

“Occupy Portland emerged on my watch when I was news editor,” Denis Theriault says, reminiscing about the five years he spent with the Mercury from 2010 to 2015. “We dove in really hard. We wanted to be the paper of record when it came to Occupy Portland. I would put my kids to bed and then head out at night to cover what was happening.”

The former editor recalls permanent camp sites were established, along with “huts, tents, and a commissary in the middle of Chapman Square.”

By then, Sam Adams was the mayor of Portland.

During Theriault’s tenure, he didn’t just embed at the Occupy protest. He was also a multi-episode champion on Jeopardy, and spent a week embedded at the Right 2 Dream Too shelter in Old Town. At the time, the newly established, self-managed homeless encampment was leasing an empty lot without the help of any government agency or nonprofit group, but it was also on shaky legal ground.

“The freedom that the Mercury gave me, and its brand, made it easier for Right 2 Dream Too to trust that we were gonna give them a fair shake,” Theriault said.

His stay at the camp, and resulting coverage, shifted the conversation about homelessness within City Hall. It also served as the foundation for his deep knowledge of the region’s complex homeless crisis, which came in handy when Theriault later took a job working for Multnomah County’s communications team.

“You get to have heart,” he says of the editorial experience at the paper. “It's not bloodless,” 

2015-2020

Come 2015, Portland was either thriving or “dying” depending on who you asked. 

Food cart owners were making the leap to brick and mortar restaurants. The tech sector had boosted the local tax coffers, but an explosion in home prices pushed out many of the city’s artists and creatives, and the city’s homeless population was growing exponentially.  

By 2016, Portlanders were bracing for a historic election, but they also had to contend with a local environmental threat after the Mercury published a series of stories about toxic emissions from a local glass manufacturing plant. 

“[The Bullseye Glass story] was huge when it landed—so much so that when I randomly began talking to a Bullseye employee at a bar around that time, he wanted to fight me,” recalls Dirk VanderHart, the news editor at the time. “The Mercury led on that coverage, both in terms of breaking news and in subsequent stories written by freelancer Dan Forbes.”

The reporting on Bullseye Glass led to a class-action lawsuit against the company, but it also reaffirmed the alt-weekly’s ability to capture the zeitgeist of the city with irreverence and snark, while simultaneously breaking sobering, investigative stories on politics, police, and public health.

The following year, Jeremy Christian fatally stabbed two men and seriously injured another on a MAX train, after spouting racist and anti-Muslim epithets at two Black teen girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab.

“First thing the next morning, after police released details about suspect, Jeremy Christian, the Mercury's Doug Brown instantly recognized Christian from a past protest event he'd covered,” VanderHart recalled. “He was able to put together a post showing Christian throwing Nazi salutes, wielding a bat, and being chased away by event organizers. The story gave additional, horrifying context to the crime at a time when the city was reeling.”

“We tried to be indispensable in terms of City Hall coverage,” VanderHart said, but at the same time, “the Mercury has always been partly about doing dumb shit.”

A recurring segment called “Worst. Night. Ever.” saw staffers forced into awful antics, like a Zach's Shack hot dog-eating contest VanderHart still regrets. A former music editor was sent to a nudist “ecstatic dance party.”

“For the 2015 ‘Weed Issue’ [the Mercury] recruited people for a ‘dabcathalon,’ wherein participants would take 10 mind-shatteringly powerful THC dabs and attempt a new physical challenge after each,” he reminisced. “They did not make it to the end.”

2020 - Present

Twenty years after producing its first print issue, in March 2020, the Portland Mercury ceased all print production. The COVID-19 pandemic’s financial toll on the paper hit hard, resulting in a sizable chunk of staff being laid off and the Mercury pivoting to web-only. 

Alex Zielinski remembers the weight of being a news editor during what was arguably the most impactful year for every print publication across the country.

“It was a really destabilizing time,” Zielinski recalls. “Suddenly I was learning about what it means to do advertising and we had no advertising. We were all burnt out and grieving the Mercury as a print product. We didn’t have an office. It was hard to be at a place that was often unserious during really serious times.”

She remembers doodling an illustration of a toilet paper roll unspooled–an homage to the struggles of the moment. The Mercury transformed the doodle into a T-shirt graphic and sold “TP tees” for $25 in 2020.

Three months into the COVID-era lockdown of 2020 came the murder of George Floyd and the widespread racial justice protests that ensued. In Portland, protests became the city’s hallmark. 

“So much of the years leading up to the pandemic was just being out in chaotic protest zones, but it was such a different protest than we have now,” Zielinski said. “Mostly they were focusing their rage at each other,” she says of antifa and Patriot Prayer. “When the George Floyd protests happened, it was people versus the police.”

That year was more than just inhaling tear gas at protests downtown. In October 2020, the Mercury published a story detailing multiple allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of E.D. Mondainé, a prominent local pastor and then-president of the Portland NAACP.

“It was such a tricky time,” Zielinski recalls. “ED Mondainé had just written an op-ed in the Washington Post. It was a moment, and it was like, ‘oh, this hero from Portland.’ [But at the same time] there were people telling me their worst stories… who were really scared of this guy with a lot of influence and power.” Mondainé denied the allegations, chalking them up to “cancel culture,” but soon after the story ran, he withdrew his reelection bid to lead the local NAACP chapter.

“It was one of those things that was like, ‘I can’t say no to this story, even if the dynamics aren’t perfect,’” Zielinski said. `

Due to staffing turnover and transitions, the Mercury had three different news editors between 2022 and 2023, but to this day still manages to churn out award-winning journalism on topics the paper has covered for over two decades, like LGBTQ+ rights, transportation and traffic deaths, housing and homelessness, and the effects of local government’s decisions on marginalized communities. 

In 2023, the Mercury reintroduced its first print issue after a long hiatus. Today, the Mercury releases nearly a dozen issues in print each year and has no intention of slowing down—or taking itself too seriously.