The Shrinking Medford Mail Tribune

The News environment has changed. There is less local news. Much less. Especially in the newspaper.

That isn't news to anyone.

Tam Moore is a familiar name in Southern Oregon. He is a lifelong professional journalist, except for a four-year period when he was a Jackson County Commissioner in the mid-1970s. He is civic-minded, active, and involved in the institutions that make a city a good place to live. I consider him a community builder, now and for over fifty years. He wrote a Guest Post here in June, saying he was a Republican, but hoped his Party changed from within. He has seen the changing news landscape both as a subject of journalism and as a professional, working journalist.

Southern Oregon is facing a milestone, and he has a story to tell. 

Guest Post by Tam Moore 

                              Shrinking Tribune

My last Saturday local newspaper came July 31. I didn’t cancel my subscription to the Mail Tribune, since 1989 the daily newspaper for Medford, Oregon.

The Tribune, like most of Oregon’s daily newspapers and a host of dailies across the country, went hybrid August 1: A combination of four print editions weekly and daily Internet posting to digital editions. 

Tam Moore, center, with John Darling and Anne Batzer

Oregon probably has just six remaining daily newspapers—and one of them, the largest in circulation Portland Oregonian, does home delivery only four days a week. One of the dailies I used to read regularly is all digital. Things are changing rapidly; I can’t be sure of the count beyond a quick web search. 

 They haven’t told me how my pre-paid MT subscription – now in its 54th year—will prorate the loss of three papers a week. I bet things are tight at Rosebud Media, publisher of the MT and the smaller Ashland Tidings. The Tidings, established in 1876, vanishes in the shake-up, replaced by an “Ashland” edition of the Tribune.

Some numbers tell the story, without even getting into “hits” on Internet sites.

When I moved here in 1967, as a junior executive with a television, radio and cable TV outfit, the MT circulation was about 29,000 households. It would grow to over 30,000 and the six-day a week Tribune expand to publishing a Saturday paper in 1989 – then under ownership of the Ottaway Newspapers. 

When I checked circulation data after reading my last Saturday paper, the Tribune reported delivery to 17,138 subscribers. That’s in a county with 88,241 households according to the latest Oregon population estimates, and a two-state Medford Designated Marketing area with a population of 394,810 people living in 184,570 households. Advertisers need penetration of a market to make ad buys worthwhile; governments and community groups need a way to communicate with citizens.

We journalists – I’ve been a member of the Society of Professional Journalists since 1954 -- had trouble with  transitions in news delivery over recent decades. TV and radio news, where I spent the first half of my career, were tough on newspapers. Then came the Internet in the 1990s and stories originating with on-the ground professional reporters were popping up for free as Google and other search engines dug into the fast-multiplying digital files. Traditional media couldn’t figure out how to monetize the content they produced.

On top of that, the proliferation of opinion commentators on cable news and Social Media news aggregators gave readers more sources for information – and viewpoints—than most could handle. Pew Research Center 2020 data show “explosive audience growth” for cable news channels in the presidential election year – Fox News’ average audience increase by 61 percent, CNN’s by 72 percent, while local television news audiences gained just 4 percent. 

Newspaper advertising revenue fell off in 2020, Pew reports, to the extent that paid subscriptions were bringing in more money than sale of advertising. Political advertising on local TV stations, on the other hand, topped $2 billion nationally among five major publicly-held local TV station groups. Digital advertising – those ads which pop-up while you are on the Internet, billed almost $250 billion in 2020, with $102.6 billion of ads on smartphones and other mobile devices.

All of this should  worry those of us concerned about a functioning democracy. Voters need information when they go to the ballot box. Government at all levels, from special districts to the Congress of the United States, needs to hear from the governed in a timely way. It takes reporters and editors to gather the news--to tell us what government is considering, so we can make our views known to the decision-makers. Without successful media companies, there won’t be folks on the ground asking the right questions and digging into the public record. 

The problem is beyond no Saturday paper. Collectively we need to figure out a successful business model for collecting and sharing local and regional news.