Old-fashioned newspaper war brews in Southern Oregon

The news desertification of Medford, Oregon, didn’t last long.

Within a week of the Medford Mail Tribune shutting down on Jan. 13, not one but two newspaper publishers announced they’re moving in to serve Medford and the Jackson County region.

Steve Forrester, president of EO Media, shared why his Salem-based company moved quickly to start a paper in Medford.

“In any community someone has to do it,” he said.

EO Media publishes 18 titles, including The Bend Bulletin, The Astorian and its namesake East Oregonian in Pendleton. A broker tried selling it the Medford Mail Tribune a year ago but the family-owned company declined.

Instead, EO Media drew on connections in Southern Oregon to launch a paper it’s calling the Rogue Valley Tribune.

Beginning in February, it will produce an online edition and print editions three days per week, delivered by mail at first and potentially through carriers later this year.

“It makes much more sense to start something,” Forrester said. “For one, there’s no acquisition cost in doing this. We don’t take on a payroll, we’ll start our own payroll, no legacy costs to pick up — we’ll start fresh.”

Why will it succeed where another failed? Forrester said it has a proven approach and journalistic mission.

The Mail Tribune’s last owner, Steven Saslow, came from Philadelphia and tried incorporating television and video content into his $15 million acquisition.

“It became a curious product,” Forrester said.

Forrester was perplexed by copies he saw.

“The front page was a strange thing. What I likened it to: There was an old ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit, is it a dessert topping or a floor wax? You look at this front page and what is it?” he said. “Confusing is the last thing you want in a newspaper design.”

EO Media is hiring a newsroom staff of 14 in Medford, which is relatively big in the era of ghost newspapers owned by hedge funds.

That’s part of its strategy to fill, rather than trim, newsrooms because “our product is our content,” Chief Operating Officer Heidi Wright said.

“It’s our time to evolve,” she said. “I think we can do that. We need enough reader revenue to adequately staff newsrooms at competitive wages to fund the journalism we do. That’s the piece we have to stay focused on: fund a newsroom, not gut a newsroom like others do.”

Bob Hunter, a former Mail Tribune editor advising EO Media, concurs.

“It’s not any great secret or secret sauce, it’s report on local news,” he said. “People I heard from who had stopped reading the paper almost uniformly said there’s just not enough local news in it for me. That was really the result of loss of staff.”

The Rogue Valley Tribune will compete with The Daily Courier of Grants Pass, based 30 miles up Interstate 5. It started moving into Medford after the Mail Tribune stopped printing in September.

The Daily Courier is hiring three Medford reporters for its five-days per week afternoon paper, which is delivered by carriers. It’s already added more than 1,000 Jackson County subscribers.

Publisher Travis Moore said in a statement that “we knew there would be competition for such a great market.”

“Ultimately, the people of the Rogue Valley will be the ones who decide,” he said. “And we think the differences between the Daily Courier and EO Media’s Tribune tip the scales in our favor.”

“The Daily Courier is delivered by carrier to doorsteps five days a week; the Tribune will be sent out by mail three days a week. The Daily Courier has been owned by the same Rogue Valley family for the last 125 years; the Tribune will be one of more than a dozen newspapers owned by a Salem-based chain.”

You’ve got to love an old-fashioned newspaper war.

It’s rare for dailies to fail without at least merging with another paper or perhaps becoming a weekly. It’s also unheard of nowadays for multiple newspapers to replace them, according to Penelope Abernathy, the journalism professor who led research documenting America’s news deserts.

“I’m not aware of any other situation like this, where you’ve had both a journalistic and business commitment made this swiftly, when a daily has closed,” she said.

Abernathy is a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School, which found two papers a week are failing on average, primarily weeklies.

While the industry is far from a turnaround, Medford is a fascinating test of different approaches to replenishing a news desert, she noted. One paper is delivered by mail, one by carriers. One has more staff but fewer print editions.

Forrester is undaunted by the competition.

“I know they’re in there. I don’t fret about that,” he said.

He declined to quantify EO Media’s investment but said it’s funded with cash reserves. He’s not expecting a huge return.

“We have a longer time horizon than the publicly traded organization,” he said, adding that long-term investments in newspapers paid off, including its 2019 acquisition of the bankrupt Bend daily.

“As family owners, we’re used to relatively smaller profit margins,” he said. “In the years that Gannett was killing it with these huge profit margins and the bigs were (too), we didn’t. That’s not our psychology. We’ve never hit the jackpot in that sense. Our mission is journalism — we provide our communities with good products and good reporting and to a large extent we’ve been rewarded for that.”

The biggest beneficiaries will be the roughly 225,000 residents of Jackson County.

They are in the enviable position of having a choice of local newspapers, committed to their community, competing for scoops and subscribers.

Hunter summed it up: “It’s better to have two than none.”