Goodbye printed newspaper

My local newspaper shrank. Shrank some more. Began printing 4 days a week. 

Now it will be on-line only.

I got the news on Wednesday, the same time my newspaper carrier told me he got it. The Medford Mail Tribune is a shadow of its former self, but I still loved holding it and reading it. Maybe the resources spent on print and delivery will end up allowing them to hire reporters. The publisher says that is his intent.

Medford is the regional market center, medical center, media center, and transportation hub for about 500,000 people. We have five local TV stations--but beginning in October no print newspaper.

I will write my own thoughts on this newspaper soon, but for today I share a Guest Post by Tam Moore. He was a County Commissioner for four years, but his real career has been journalism. He worked in the early days of local TV news and later he wrote for the Capital Press, a West Coast newspaper focusing on agricultural news. 

Guest Post by Tam Moore

One year ago this blog noted the “shrinking” of the Medford Mail Tribune from a newspaper published every day to four-day-a-week publication with daily digital editions. The Trib made that change July 31, 2021, and we worried about a successful business model for collecting local news and sharing it with a regional audience.

Well, that 2021 business model didn’t work.

Tam Moore

 Publisher Steven Saslow this past week announced that the last printed Mail Tribune will be September 30.  

For now, electronic editions of the paper will continue. He hopes to use the on-line format for expanded news coverage. Let’s hope so, because when I Googled the Trib’s “E-Edition” link the only story present was an August 19 report that the U.S. Forest service would be closing an Applegate River campsite frequented by bears with a penchant for raiding trash containers.  Clicking on a sidebar box did get me today’s summary from the local copshops and yesterday’s criminal docket in circuit court.

This is going to take some getting used to, that’s for sure. And I’m going to miss the Albertson/Safeway grocery insert every Wednesday where I troll for their “digital bargains” only available if downloaded to my smartphone. There are some printed newspapers delivered in Medford, but for a county with 88,241 households to have no daily printed newspaper is a shame.  

There was a time in the 19th and 20th Century when Jackson County, Oregon was awash in newspapers. The first, called the Table Rock Sentinel, was published in Jacksonville in 1855 – back when Oregon was a territory of the United States. When Medford was born in 1885 with arrival of the O&C Railroad, the newly-christened Medford Monitor was sold on the streets, the very next year, Southern Oregon Transcript, another weekly, began publication. By 1888, the Medford Mail was in business. 

Those were the days when newspapers were partisan. You’d find Republican papers, Democratic papers and in that era populist papers. By the first decade of the 20th Century Medford had a morning Mail, an afternoon Tribune and a flock of weekly papers. George Putnam consolidated the Mail Tribune in 1909. Putnam was a legend in local political history. He witnessed a 1907 dispute between the Mayor of Medford and the owner of a short-line railroad connecting with Jacksonville – then the county seat. There was a lawsuit over the resulting assault trial. Putnam got sued for libel over his printed commentary on the trial in progress. He lost at circuit court only to have the Oregon Supreme Court set aside the libel judgement. Putnam was awarded $45 in court costs. He left Medford in 1919 to edit the Capital Journal in Salem. 

Robert Ruhl, who came to Medford in 1911 as part owner of the weekly Medford Sun newspaper and the Mail Tribune, became the Trib’s editor and publisher when Putnam left for Salem. Ruhl promptly declared the Trib “an independent newspaper.” 

Newspapers figured in Medford’s scandal of the early 1930’s – and the Mail Tribune emerged with the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for public service over coverage of “unscrupulous politicians in Jackson County.” Key players in that affair were Llewellyn Banks, a local orchardist who published the Jackson County News and Earl Fehl, publisher of the Pacific Record-Herald. Fehl was convicted for stealing ballots from the new county courthouse in Medford. Banks got a life sentence for killing the town constable who was trying to arrest Banks for involvement in the same ballot theft.  To learn more about those times, here’s a link: Good Government Congress (Jackson County Rebellion) (oregonencyclopedia.org)

There are some things you get from the local newspaper which are very serious such as what Robert Ruhl would later call “the strife of 1933.”  And then there are the entertaining gems which crop up. It takes a reading of the MMT in April 1957 to know that when the Medford City Council switched from meetings on Tuesday evenings to meetings Thursday evenings, one of the reported benefits to the switch was being able to watch the Phil Silvers Sgt. Bilko show on Tuesday nights. 

Newspapers have been part of my life since reading the wirephoto page captions during World War II. As a sixth grader I began delivering the Corvallis Gazette-Times and by college I was in the G-T pressroom as night editor of the campus daily newspaper. Adjusting to no daily paper will be hard, but what I really worry about is the news void which comes to a community without a printed paper. Broadcast news, where I spent almost half of my professional life, and Internet news aren’t quite the same as printed news.

With a newspaper, you can take your time reading. You can set the thing aside. Or clip out a story. Perhaps someone will figure out the business model which works so we can have a printed newspaper.