By MIKE ROGOWAY/The Oregonian/OregonLive
Eugene lost dozens of local journalists after The Register-Guard newspaper sold to corporate, out-of-state owners in 2018. Longtime Register-Guard columnist Bob Welch said the community also lost a sense of itself.
“Eugene has always been a politically yeasty place,” Welch said, given to ideological foment and agitation. And yet Welch said The Register-Guard had served as a kind of public square, a nexus of events and ideas where residents of different ideologies could hash out civic priorities based on a commonly accepted version of the facts.
The job cuts at The Register-Guard created a void that disconnected neighbors from one another, Welch said, everyone operating with less information about the community around them.
“It’s left us a darker, more skeptical place,” said Welch, 71, who wrote 2,000 columns for The Register-Guard over 24 years at the paper.
Thursday’s launch of a digital news site called Lookout Eugene-Springfield, in Welch’s view, represents a chance to rebuild those connections. He will write twice a month for the new publication, which aims to produce local journalism with a business model customized for the digital age.
Lookout has raised nearly $3.7 million in philanthropic donations and launches with a staff of 10 journalists, which it hopes to expand to 15 in the coming weeks. That’s a fraction of the 80 people who once populated The Register-Guard’s newsroom but it’s still the biggest new journalism organization to launch in Oregon in a quarter century.
Modeled on a sister publication in Santa Cruz, California, Lookout plans to report on city hall, the environment, schools, local arts and Oregon Ducks sports in much the way legacy newspapers once covered midsized cities like Eugene. It’s already published its first article, an investigation into the death of a Lane County man at the Oregon State Hospital.
Lookout will have an opinion section with opinion pieces from the community and, eventually, staff editorials.
“It is the gamut of what you expect from a good community newspaper,” said Ken Doctor, Lookout’s founder and CEO, “except it’s delivered to you digitally.”
Doctor ran an alternative newspaper in Eugene in the 1970s and early 1980s before launching a long career with big newspaper chains and as a prominent journalism business strategist. He lives in Santa Cruz but has spent much of the last several months in Eugene, preparing for Lookout’s launch.
Oregon newspapers have lost three-quarters of their jobs this century as news moved online, where the advertising market is controlled by large tech companies and many readers expect journalism to be free. A new report by the University of Oregon finds nearly 20 local news publications have closed across the state since 2022 and the surviving outlets are producing less public affairs reporting.
Scores of papers, big and small, have tried and failed to adapt their businesses to the new economics. While Portland has a lively news ecosystem, with legacy papers, public radio and TV all jostling for audience, publications have frequently struggled in smaller cities.
That’s true even in Eugene, Oregon’s second-largest city with nearly 180,000 residents.
Eugene and Springfield have local TV affiliates, college newspapers, a popular alt-weekly and a public radio station. The Register-Guard, now owned by the Gannett chain, still publishes a print edition six days a week, and its website lists a newsroom of three editors and eight reporters. (The Register-Guard’s editor didn’t respond to a request for comment on Lookout’s launch, but the paper appears to have added back four newsroom positions over the past two years.)
All that together doesn’t replace the loss of a thriving daily newspaper, according to David Fidanque, a former Eugene TV news reporter who later spent 33 years with the ACLU of Oregon. He and his wife donated to Lookout, Fidanque said, because they see many civic issues that aren’t being covered by the current news outlets and because they like the new publication’s community focus.
“Lookout is going to have the resources to pick up a lot of that slack. Certainly not all of it,” Fidanque said.
Camilla Mortensen, editor of the Eugene Weekly, said she welcomes another journalistic voice in town, pressing local government for more transparency. But she said she wonders about the value of adding another news site in Eugene’s market when so many smaller towns in the region have no local journalism at all.
“There are true news deserts in Oregon that I would love to see getting a boost,” Mortensen said.
Central to Lookout’s vision is a business model that blends philanthropy, digital subscriptions and local advertising.
Lookout is a for-profit, “public benefit” corporation, which means it works to balance civic good alongside shareholder profits. Doctor owns the business, though he has issued stock options to managers and employees. The company is using philanthropy to fund its launch, including $1 million from the Tykeson Family Foundation, but Lookout aims to cover its own costs in the future.
The news site will carry digital ads and, after 90 days of free trials following Lookout’s launch, it will set up a paywall – albeit a flexible one. Lookout plans to offer readers up to three free articles each month before they must pay to keep reading.
Founding memberships offered at launch start at $250 for one year. Once Lookout erects its paywall, it plans to charge readers around $15 a month.
Lookout hopes to launch news sites in three more cities by the end of 2026, targeting other regions where corporate ownership has decimated the legacy newspaper. Lookout paused site selection in recent months while focused on Eugene but plans to resume scouting locations in June.
Since Lookout doesn’t have a print edition, the news site hopes to connect with its audience in the real world by opening its downtown Eugene newsroom to public “listening sessions,” tours and parties for members, who already number 260.
A physical newsroom is key to Lookout’s vision, Doctor said, a central hub for its journalism and a symbol of the publication’s role in the community.
“A newspaper is the symbol of the city and that is part of what we need to recreate,” Doctor said.
In many communities, the loss of a strong local journalism voice opened a gap that “bad actors” rushed in to fill, according to Andrew DeVigal, director of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon.
Often, he said, community news in places without a local news source devolves into raucous social media discussions where small-town neighbors launch ad hominem attacks against one another with only a passing understanding of the facts.
Lookout’s track record in Santa Cruz – where it won a Pulitzer Prize last year for breaking news coverage of massive flooding – demonstrates the value of a news outlet with a civic focus, DeVigal said.
“That’s part of the Pulitzer that they won, is because they reconsidered the process of producing journalism by reconsidering the community’s needs,” he said.
And yet Lookout and all local news outlets are competing for the same audiences with a constrained pool of financial resources. So DeVigal said it’s important that news outlets pool their efforts to produce outstanding local coverage.
“Yes, we need more journalists. Yes, we need more outlets. But we need more collaboration,” DeVigal said.
Lookout plans to carry state news coverage from Oregon Public Broadcasting along with reports from the Oregon Journalism Project, a new investigative nonprofit affiliated with Willamette Week. But that decision has already rankled some in its community.
The Oregon Journalism Project originally planned to partner with the Eugene Weekly but in December the nonprofit “uninvited” the Weekly and joined up with Lookout instead. The Weekly satirized that slight in its April Fool’s edition, joking that it planned new publications in Portland and Santa Cruz – areas it lampooned as “alt-weekly news deserts” in need of more coverage.
Digital journalism startups have sometimes struggled to build a local audience, in part because they don’t have a legacy brand to build upon and don’t have a physical product on newsstands. Prospective readers have to learn the new outlet exists, then be motivated to look it up online.
“You can’t just take print out of people’s hands. There has to be a little bit more of a buy-in for digital,” said Mortensen, the Weekly’s editor. She said a lot of what the dedicated news audience in Eugene misses about The Register-Guard is a breadth daily news, reported promptly and thoroughly, in a physical newspaper.
Lookout hopes it can reach some that core audience by inviting them into its newsroom, and it plans to build awareness of its website by advertising on Eugene radio and TV.
Ultimately, executive editor Dann Miller hopes Lookout’s journalism will speak for itself. He said the paper has been stockpiling reports in advance of its launch and plans early coverage of a coming school board election, Eugene’s controversial “fire fee” levied on property owners, the city’s homeless crisis, affordable housing and local impacts from climate change.
“When you’re able to solve a problem for people,” Miller said, “you’ve got them hooked.”
- Mike Rogoway covers Oregon technology and the state economy for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach him at mrogoway@oregonian.com.
I wish them success. Eugene Register Guard once was a good newspaper when it was locally owned, but Ganett has turned it into USA Today generic mush with a skeleton staff compared with the old days.
Agree, I wish all those supporting and writing for Lookout success.