Faithful readers of The New Era may notice something slightly different in this issue – and I’m not talking about our Spring Sports Preview, which is something we do at the start of every high school sports season.
Rather, it might be page 8, which has the header “Central Linn News” at the top.
Many Sweet Home residents are aware of the fact that the Brownsville Times, a newspaper that existed for 139 years, gave up the ghost a few weeks before Christmas. More than a few folks in Sweet Home mentioned it to us, telling us they were sad to see it go, partly because they had just become aware of the fact that The New Era was also struggling.
The people of Central Linn – Brownsville and Halsey in particular, were even more so.
I was aware that The Times and its publisher, Vance Parrish, had been struggling, but I was as surprised as anyone when the end came. And I was sorry.
However, we had more immediate challenges: saving The New Era. Thanks to the generosity of the community and the dedication of our staff, and God’s help, The New Era isn’t completely out of the woods but we’re putting out papers every week and the community’s support gives us every reason to be optimistic that we can get the newspaper back on solid ground. We’re making good progress and I think we’re getting better.
Meanwhile, we’ve been getting communications from readers, citizens and community leaders who live in the Central Linn area, asking if we can do something for them now that their newspaper is gone.
One thing we’ve been able to do right off the bat is provide a vehicle for folks in that area to publish necessary legal advertising, which in Oregon must be run in newspapers that meet certain standards, as we do.
Legal advertising doesn’t represent a huge portion of revenue for a newspaper like The New Era, but as many of our readers are now aware, everything (including their contributions) has been necessary to get this ship back on course, and that includes legal advertising – which comes under “attack” nearly every year in the legislature and is the subject of another such battle right now. But I digress.
The fact is, we’re running advertising for communities that don’t have a newspaper – other than the Democrat-Herald, and we’ve decided to provide some very basic coverage for them in response. A lot happens in the Central Linn area, particularly in Brownsville, and some of that may very likely be of interest to our Sweet Home-area readers.
We actually have had readers down Highway 228 tell us that they really appreciated the story we ran earlier this month on the death of Joni Nelson, who was a prominent figure in community life south of Holley and Crawfordsville. We’ve had more than a few tell us that they like being able to learn what’s happening down the road.
Right now, we’re focused on rebuilding the advertising for The New Era, which is critical to its existence. We’re also working to develop some volunteer writers, some of whose bylines you’ve already seen and others that you should see soon.
What we’re trying to work toward is a more community-based, multiple-revenue-sourced newspaper operation that will be more sustainable in a world in which running a newspaper is more challenging than ever. Our goal is to continue to provide very focused local coverage that Sweet Home is used to and expects. But we also have to figure out how to make your newspaper as financially stable as possible.
That may require expanding our horizons a bit, especially in the constantly changing world of technology and competition from all sides, much of it purporting to be news with little care for accuracy.
There is talk of trying to revive the Brownsville Times as a nonprofit operation, so we’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, though our primary focus will continue to be Sweet Home, as we try to help the neighbors down the road keep up with big things that are happening in their neck of the woods, you might get a taste of that as well.