Next week’s edition of The New Era will include some changes.
As of Jan. 1, we will begin extending our weekly coverage of Sweet Home to the entire east Linn County – most notably, Lebanon.
The reasons for that move have been detailed in an editorial in the Nov. 26 edition and in the editorial on page 4 of this edition.
The practical outcome for readers is you will see, along with the fairly normal Sweet Home coverage that we offer each week, Lebanon-area news and sports and advertisements.
“We’ve decided that, in today’s economy for newspapers, the best way to provide more stability for the entire operation is to publish a single weekly newspaper that serves both communities,” said Scott Swanson, who with his wife Miriam are co-publishers of the newspapers.
They founded the Lebanon Local monthly publication in 2016, at the behest of leading citizens of Lebanon when it became increasingly evident that the Lebanon Express, which had served the community for over a century, was nearing the end of its existence, at least in print.
“We figured at that time that we could provide a quality monthly newspaper with the staff we had, which turned out to be the case,” Swanson said. “But although our intention from the beginning has always been to turn it into a weekly publication, for various reasons we were unable to do that.”
Combining the newspapers into a single weekly publication, he added, will greatly increase the potential for advertising revenue, which is essential to provide the kind of staffing needed to adequately cover the entire region.
The newspaper will retain the name “The New Era,” though the flag on the front page will include some small modifications to represent a wide scope of east Linn County.
“This community’s newspaper is nearing the century mark – it was founded in 1929,” Swanson said. “The New Era is an innocuous name that will, frankly, summarize what’s happening for Lebanon.”
The New Era will continue to cover Sweet Home government and community activities as it always has, but will include similar coverage of Lebanon and its surrounding communities – Sodaville and Waterloo – will also be included, as news develops.
Plus, The New Era will include weekly coverage of Lebanon-area sports while continuing to cover Sweet Home sports – high school during the school year and junior baseball and softball and others during the summer.
Lebanon and Sweet Home governmental and sports news will be packaged separately as much as possible.
“Our page size, which we don’t have a lot of control over, doesn’t allow us as much flexibility as we’d like, but that’s the goal,” Swanson said. “Our goal is to fill in a lot of blanks for Lebanon that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time, while continuing to provide the best news coverage we can for Sweet Home.”
Human interest stories, obituaries, police reports, real estate and other “common-interest” stories pertaining to east Linn County as a whole will fill out the rest of the paper.
Public Safety logs will include both Lebanon and Sweet Home (and south county) news, as will obituaries, opinion page content, events listings and other news of common interest. Special sections, such as programs for community events, will also be common.
Initially, both websites will continue until further notice, Swanson said
For more on the merger, see our editorial.