A second newspaper for Southern Oregon.
The Rogue Valley Tribune is gearing up, staffing up, renting space, building a photo library, and getting ready to publish.
 |
| Photo credit: Jamie Lusch, Rogue Valley Tribune |
Ronald Kramer, Executive Director of the Southern Oregon Historical Society, confirmed yesterday that SOHS will be leasing space to the Rogue Valley Tribune. The Rogue Valley Tribune is the second newspaper to see an opportunity in the market left vacant by the abrupt closure of Medford's Mail Tribune. The RVT will publish in a different format from old-style newspapers. It plans a 24-7 on-line newspaper, with a printed version published three times a week.
The Historical Society owns the large downtown building that once was the home for JCPenney department store. The two-story building houses the Historical Society's library, archives, exhibits, and headquarters. It has 5,000 square feet of upstairs space being readied to house the RVT. Heidi Wright, the COO of RVT's corporate parent, the EO Media Group, said they plan to hire 14 staff people in the newsroom, including reporters, photographers, and editors.
Kramer said the Historical Society was "not playing favorites." He was referring to the competition between the Daily Courier, which is expanding from its Grants Pass base, and the Rogue Valley Tribune, which is entering fresh territory. Kramer said the new tenant is a "great match for our situation." The “situation” is that the SOHS needs income.
In decades past, the Historical Society had its own tax base and the financial resources to run a large museum in Jacksonville, manage other properties, and place multiple "living history" characters onto the streets of Jacksonville. That all ended. Changes in state law allowed special-purpose tax levies, including the local Historical Levy, to be incorporated into the county general fund. The Jackson County commissioners absorbed the Historical Levy and defunded the SOHS. That left the SOHS owning large, complicated properties and archives, including the historic Hanley Farm and the JCPenney building, but without sufficient income to operate them. The upstairs floor of the JCPenney building gives SOHS a rent-paying tenant.
The building modifications are physical evidence that a newspaper is on its way to Medford. The photo of the JCPenney building is another. The RVT lacks a bank of stock images of the Rogue Valley to use in upcoming news stories. Their editor, David Smigelski, said newly hired photojournalists were on the streets right now building that inventory. The JCPenney photo is an example of that work.
 |
| The EO Media Group newspapers |
Smigelski said this is a new era for newspapers in Southern Oregon because the RVT owners are newspaper people, not finance people. Smigelski had worked for the Mail Tribune in the past. He said the Mail Tribune's previous owners "talked about money, money, money." They were in the money business, not the news business, he said.
The Murdoch owners told us, "Do more with less." The Gateway owners said, "Do less with less." Our little Valley's newspapers became a plaything for giant multi-national players.
Things are different now, Smigelski said. At last a family owned newspaper returns to Medford, and they care about news.
The Daily Courier is also family owned and it also seems to care about local news. Newspaper competition is new to Southern Oregon. I like what I see of the Daily Courier. They are making waves by closely reporting on the Josephine County commission. Good. They are doing the watchdog job of a newspaper. We have not had much of that in Medford for years. The competition is already helping improve news quality. An early version of yesterday's blog post said that the Rogue Valley Tribune announced plans for 14 new reporters, substantially more than what the Daily Courier planned. The editor of the Courier promptly contacted me. He reminded me they had announced 14 overall news staff, of whom only seven were reporters. I welcome the correction.
I urge readers not to wait on the sidelines to see how things settle out. This is an expensive time for each paper as each attempts to build a subscriber base. Newspapers and their advertisers need an audience. Be that audience. Subscribe to both. We can support two newspapers. Competition will sharpen the news and rebuild a news-reading better-informed citizenry. If there is an audience, advertisers will pay to reach that audience. This can work. Two are better than one. And far better than none.
[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]
9 comments:
Stop the presses!!!
Who cares???
About 3/4 of my readers live in Oregon and 1/4 are out of area, especially located on the east coast's large cities. I base that estimate on comments I get and corrections and inquiries I get sent directly. I recognize I may be turning off out-of-area readers, but the phenomenon of closing newspapers is a national story. How a community fares in the aftermath is another national story.
I recognize that not every reader will love every post. Keep reading. I might get better with time.
Peter Sage
Who cares? Anyone who cares about democracy, or what our local politicians, bureaucrats, businesses, artists, criminals, etc. are up to.
A free press is the only profession mentioned in the Constitution, because a democracy can’t function without it. We have three branches of government that are supposed to have built in checks and balances, but as we’ve seen, they don’t always work so well. That leaves us with the “fourth estate,” the news media, to try and keep them honest. TV stations do carry local news, but they don't have much in the way of investigative journalism.
As Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have said: “It’s a republic, if you can keep it.” Keeping it requires our participation and support.
I care; I live in Central Point, where our state senator apparently took all of last year off without much notice. Who's to know, if we don't have local news? I am also concerned about downtown Medford, and I think 14 new jobs on N. Central Avenue is going to be a great boost to local business. And I'm impressed that the editor of The Daily Courier reads this blog; it shows he cares about what locals--and others--think.
Anonymous seems to be one of those voters or at least a citizen Former Guy spoke of so fondly 6 or 7 years ago before being launched into the Oval Office with the help of his Russian Puppet Masters ; as I recall it, he said at one of his Nuremburg like rallies
"I love uninformed voters".
That said, I'm already subscribed to the GP Courier, and today will subscribe to the new and hopefully improved Tribune.
Those of us who care about the integrity of journalism and the erosion of public trust in it might be interested in this series in the Columbia Journalism Review (a very progressive publication) about how biased and wrong the mainstream media’s coverage of RussiaGate was.
The series references research by the Pew Research Center, which is not, as far as I know, a subsidiary of Fox News. 😀
Here is the editor’s note on the series:
Seven and a half years ago, journalism began a tortured dance with Donald Trump, the man who would be the country’s forty-fifth president—first dismissing him, then embracing him as a source of ratings and clicks, then going all in on efforts to catalogue Trump as a threat to the country (also a great source of ratings and clicks).
No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate. The story, which included the Steele dossier and the Mueller report among other totemic moments, resulted in Pulitzer Prizes as well as embarrassing retractions and damaged careers. For Trump, the press’s pursuit of the Russia story convinced him that any sort of normal relationship with the press was impossible.
For the past year and a half, CJR has been examining the American media’s coverage of Trump and Russia in granular detail, and what it means as the country enters a new political cycle. Investigative reporter Jeff Gerth interviewed dozens of people at the center of the story—editors and reporters, Trump himself, and others in his orbit.
The result is an encyclopedic look at one of the most consequential moments in American media history. Gerth’s findings aren’t always flattering, either for the press or for Trump and his team. Doubtless they’ll be debated and maybe even used as ammunition in the ongoing media war being waged in the country. But they are important, and worthy of deep reflection as the campaign for the presidency is about, once again, to begin.
Trump was hardly the first president to have an adversarial relationship with the press, but was the first to attack it as “the enemy of the people.”
For the record, the Mueller report offers a comprehensive investigation of “RussiaGate,” and it’s no hoax. Russia engaged in extensive attacks on the U.S. election system in 2016 and the investigation identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
Cataloguing Trump as a threat to the country couldn’t have been more accurate, as his coup attempt bore out. Incredibly, most Republicans are still dismissive of it.
Two points:
1. Sometimes big media (small too) gets it wrong, print, broadcast, social, and cable. Sometimes they have an agenda that is contrary to what is actually happening, but the truth eventually comes out. eg see recent news about a certain laptop.
2. Unless there is a benefactor with deep pockets, that media requires revenue to pay the bills and the salaries of the people that gather and organize that news.
Most of that revenue comes from advertisers and subscribers. Those running the media businesses know that very well, but the consumers of that news and opinion typically don't really understand that at all.
In a word, gathering news and disseminating it broadly costs money. It's not free.
Southern Oregon has been a news desert for a long time. Its government needs that oversight. That is what media do.
Sign me up!
Post a Comment