News out of my hometown of Portland, Ore. punched me in the gut.

The Oregonian, once considered one of the nation’s great newspapers, is going to publish three print editions a week. It’s going to lay off scores of newsroom staffers, move from its iconic downtown building and promote its digital presence to the hilt.

Some folks call it “progress.” I call it pitiful.

http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-30341-oregonian_publisher_says_paper_is_reducing_home_de.html

I almost don’t know where to begin sorting this out.

Advance Publications owns the Oregonian. Advance has done similar things to newspapers it owns across the nation. The most notable scaling back occurred in New Orleans, where the Times-Picayune – another great publication – went to a thrice-weekly print cycle, only to return to a seven-day cycle when it realized its readers and advertisers were abandoning the Picayune in favor of the Baton Rouge Advocate.

The Oregonian experienced a tremendous resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s. A new executive editor took over a newsroom that had gotten flabby. She retooled beats, reorganized the operation from stem to stern. The result was Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism that the paper hadn’t seen since the 1950s.

What’s more, the paper was a cash cow for Newhouse Corp., which owned the paper. Then the bottom fell out of the newspaper business around, oh, 2006, thanks largely to the Internet. Newspapers didn’t know how to handle the new wave of information transmission. I’m guessing the Oregonian is like a lot of big media companies that struggled to find its way.

The three-day print edition idea is going to upset a lot of folks who once considered the Oregonian to be the premier news source in Oregon and a good chunk of Washington state.

I once had a grand dream of working for my hometown paper. I actually did work for a time at the late Oregon Journal, the afternoon paper that Newhouse also owned. The Journal shared the same building as the Oregonian, but it had a separate newsroom staff that competed intently against the bigger morning paper. Newhouse eventually gave up on the Journal and closed it in the early 1980s. That was a sad day for everyone who loved newspapers.

The news out of Portland today, though, is downright tragic.

I will need more time to process this news. I might have more to say on it later. Right now, I’m going to sip on my beer at home here in Texas and wonder what the future holds for what we used to know as daily print journalism.