By BRIER DUDLEY/The Seattle Times
One of the worst-kept secrets in Oregon’s news industry was revealed last week when industry veteran Ken Doctor formally announced plans for a new digital outlet in Eugene.
Lookout Eugene-Springfield is expected to debut in early 2025 with a 15-person newsroom and a business model honed over the last four years in California.
“The right people with the right model, and really with a lot of journalistic energy, can do a lot,” Doctor said. “The idea isn’t just to sustain it but to grow it.”
Doctor graduated from the University of Oregon, worked at daily newspapers and became a prominent industry consultant. In 2020 he became a publisher himself, launching Lookout Santa Cruz as a for-profit, digital-only news outlet. It competes with a local newspaper that dwindled under Wall Street ownership.
The Santa Cruz outlet, supported by advertising, membership sales and donors like Google, has a 10-person newsroom. In May it received a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its 2023 coverage of flooding and mudslides.
If he stays true to form, they’ll be in college towns like Eugene where chain owners gutted the local paper. Corvallis seems like an obvious candidate.
Because of Doctor’s profile and success in Santa Cruz, these startups will be closely watched as a potential model for recreating the community service of a local newspaper in a low-cost, purely digital format.
“It’s fun and instructive to see him eating his own cooking,” said Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Philadelphia-based Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
Lookout Eugene is one of several intriguing news ventures coming to Oregon amid industry turbulence. More than half the state’s newspapers are undergoing consolidation, sales and layoffs.
To help backfill the news deserts, the co-founder of Willamette Week started a statewide investigative reporting initiative, the Oregon Journalism Project. The nonprofit debuting this fall is supported by regional philanthropists.
“Any effort to hire local journalists is a good thing in my opinion,” she said. “It serves the community, it serves the craft of journalism and I applaud Ken for thinking out of the box and hopefully building a sustainable business that will serve Eugene and Oregon well for a long time to come.”
Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis told me the city has “struggled like other communities” with declining local news and Lookout’s arrival “is an excellent thing.”
“Better local coverage or coverage of local news just makes for a stronger democracy,” she said. “It makes for a stronger local government because people have an opportunity to understand the issues, study them and draw reasonable opinions about what’s going on.”
In addition to supporting the community, Doctor hopes to set an example of how news startups can succeed and do so without being overly dependent on philanthropy.
While philanthropy is an important part of the model for supporting local news nowadays, he’s wary of outlets becoming perpetually dependent on donations for most of their revenue. He favors using such support mostly to fund the creation of news organizations like his Lookout sites.
Lookout is a public-benefit corporation. In Oregon, for-profit companies filing as such must produce an annual report describing how their work benefits the public and meets standards for creating a positive impact.
Finding a sustainable model is the question facing publishers in thousands of communities where the survival of critical local-news coverage is at risk. A few states have stepped in to help but the federal government has been slow to respond, despite its obligation to protect the press.
Doctor raised nearly $3.5 million so far to launch the Eugene site, and word of the project spread as he shook the trees and advertised jobs. Among the 21 families or couples that donated as of Tuesday is the Baker family that used to publish the Eugene Register-Guard.
Also contributing are Google and some national organizations.
Donations are mostly funneled through the Lenfest Institute. It’s a fiscal agent and has not donated to Lookout, though it might if the program expands nationally, Friedlich said.
While Oregon’s philanthropic capacity is finite, Friedlich noted that residents have strongly supported news organizations like Oregon Public Broadcasting.
“There is a first-mover advantage that Ken has taken that benefited him,” he said. “But where there’s news and money there’s potential for supporting local news.”
- Brier Dudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative. Its weekly newsletter: st.news/FreePressNewsletter. Reach him at bdudley@seattletimes.com
