As reported on page 1 of today’s issue, we’re about to embark on a new era for The New Era as we expand our coverage of east Linn County as a whole.
Don’t worry. The newspaper will still be devoted to Sweet Home, but as I mentioned in an editorial last month, we’ve decided to combine our Lebanon Local monthly with The New Era weekly and will now focus our coverage on the broader east Linn County region, rather than producing two separate local newspapers.
I’ll go into more detail on all of that next week, which will be the first issue that will go out to Lebanon readers as well as you, the readers of The New Era. But after nearly 20 years of publishing your newspaper, my wife Miriam and I have concluded that this is the best course for The New Era, particularly in light of the difficulties that have arisen in newspaper publishing in recent years.
I told someone recently: Publishers don’t get thrown in jail for saying bad things about politicians any more, thankfully, but some of the difficulties that newspapers had back in the early days, the days of Ben Franklin and John Peter Zenger, are not unlike those we’re experiencing today. It isn’t legal stress now; it’s economic.
I briefly referenced this in that earlier editorial, but the situation is grim; over half of the counties in the United States right now are “news deserts,” meaning they have little to no access to credible, comprehensive local news and information, usually because their local newspaper has folded.
In Oregon, Sherman and Wheeler counties are officially “news deserts,” but quite a few other counties only have one newspaper, and many of those are mere shadows of what they once were. Granted, the populations may not be large, but even a small community needs to have credible information to function well.
The biggest challenge for newspapers now (in addition to many others that I won’t detail here) is the fierce competition for advertising dollars – more fierce than anything I’ve ever seen in 40-plus years in this business, and actually, arguably more than has ever occurred in the history of our nation.
Newspapers have been weakened by corporate management that has decimated news staffs in favor of immediate profits, eventually killing once-healthy local newspapers because, to put it bluntly, too many investors don’t care about journalism.
Plus, because newspapers have weakened, a lot of people who should be reading their local newspaper are not. They get their information from social media and who knows where else.
Newspapers, like any other human institutions, are not perfect because they’re produced by people who aren’t perfect (as you are probably aware if you ever read our corrections on page 2). Human weakness has been exacerbated, in my opinion, by overt bias and faulty, slanted reporting that has reduced the trust of readers.
Yes, it pains me too. We all, by nature, are biased, but we believe journalists should at least attempt to be fair, to report as objectively as they can, and that’s what we strive for here. We don’t live by the notion that truth is whatever we want it to be.
But back to our main point: Our goal in combining the newspapers is to better serve Lebanon, which has a much larger economy than Sweet Home, while maintaining what we do here. That latter part is important: We want Sweet Home readers to continue to get the same (or better) news coverage you are used to.
The only area that you might see change is that we will not, at least initially, provide quite the “saturation” photo and story coverage of home contests every week for high school sports that we have in the past, because we will also cover Lebanon and East Linn Christian Academy.
However, our commitment to making coverage as balanced as possible (we try to cover golf as faithfully as we do baseball) will continue, and we will provide weekly summaries of how all the local teams did, as thoroughly as possible.
We hope to have more pages, especially if residents respond by subscribing and businesses respond to the increased circulation by advertising and sponsorships. As revenue increases, so will our staff, which will mean more local news coverage.
Again, this makes the most sense to us of any of the alternatives we’ve considered for how to put your newspaper on a more stable financial footing and how to get staffing to where it needs to be.
In the new year we plan to provide you with a survey that will give readers a chance to tell us what you like and don’t like, and what you’d like to see in the newspaper. It’s been in the works, and the goal is to have it to you soon.
We’re off to a new year, and I hope this is a banner one for The New Era and its readers.
Happy New Year!