Happy New Year!
This is the 95th year of publication for The New Era, and given what’s happened to nearly 10 other local newspapers in Oregon in the last six months, I feel privileged to write this editorial in this medium as we swing into 2025.
The Brownsville Times was the latest, and it was forced to close entirely. It printed its last edition on Dec. 5, then literally died with hardly a peep.
Last June, five of the 12 newspapers owned by Eastern Oregon Media Group, all east of the Cascades, were converted to online-only status, and later the entire chain was sold to Carpenter Media Group of Mississippi, which also bought the Portland-based Pamplin Media Group, which published two dozen newspapers and websites, including its flagship paper, the Portland Tribune.
Shortly after, layoffs took place and later, two of those newspapers were shuttered entirely.
It’s no secret that newspapers across the country have been struggling. Profit margins have suffered in recent years as print publications have sustained a proverbial “thousand cuts.”
Those include, but certainly are not limited to:
n Increases in printing, mailing and staffing costs (that last one is a doozy in this economic climate);
n Massive losses of classified advertising to Craigslist, Indeed, and other online competitors;
n Reduced display advertising revenue as local businesses have closed or decided to focus on social media, highway billboards, and other media;
n Loss of legal advertising as state legislators have opted to reduce advertising requirements or loosened the rules regarding where those ads could appear;
n Loss of inserts as stores have opted for online advertising instead of placing advertising inserts in the local newspaper (to be fair, the decisions to not advertise in your local paper often are made by people headquartered in distant places, and not necessarily by local managers);
n The theft of news stories (paid for by local newspaper operations) by Google and Facebook AI “scraping,” which keeps readers from going to newspaper websites; and more.
Putting it bluntly, it’s been an ongoing battle in a business that, by its very nature, is very demanding. But it’s a necessary one.
In today’s world, maintaining the financial health of a local newspaper operation requires creativity, dedicated and energetic sales efforts and constant reminders to the community of their need for a newspaper. It can be done, but it requires focus and fervor.
Here’s the good news: As mentioned already in a previous editorial that appeared on Dec. 25, we have seen such a significant response from the community – subscribers, advertisers and the general public as a whole, that my wife and I are fully committed pressing forward in this new year and working to bring The New Era back to where we would like to see it be.
The outpouring of support has convinced us, rather overwhelmingly, that the community as a whole wants a local newspaper that tells them what is happening in a way that brings the community together and highlights events and people that are worthy of public attention. That, in a nutshell, is what any good local newspaper should be doing.
What, exactly, that entails will be yet to be seen in the case of The New Era.
Whatever the best formula is for its success and longevity, the goal will be to establish a newspaper that not only serves this community well, but is economically viable in an environment that, as described above, is very challenging.
Immediately, we are focused on stabilizing our staff and organization, and getting up to speed on helpful technological advancements our predecessor, Chris Chapman, has implemented. Many of them represent significant improvements to the production processes we were using before Chris took over the newspaper operation midway through 2023.
They will help us be efficient while producing a newspaper that serves you, the public, with timely, authoritative, accurate reporting on activities in the local community and that will help local businesses connect with the local population in ways that other media do not.
We’ll be getting into a lot more details in coming weeks and months, especially as they take shape.
We have had more than a few people reach out to offer help in ways that are not just financial, which we sincerely appreciate and which we will be certainly following up on.
However, our major focus right now is serving you as thoroughly as possible with the resources we have immediately available to produce accurate and unbiased news coverage of our community – governance, schools, sports, law enforcement and courts, and many other interesting and important things that are occurring in Sweet Home.
That’s our job.