MEDFORD, Ore. — In downtown Medford, smoke fills the air from the wildfires burning in the region — the Bedrock Fire to the north and the Flat Fire to the west. Inside the tiny newsroom of the brand new Rogue Valley Times, the news team is coming up with a game plan to cover the fires.
"Find a person and start to tell their story. Use all of your senses, your ears and your eyes," said editor Dave Smigelski.
The rest of the team is working on other stories this morning, following up on an investigation or making plans to cover a community event. But it's July in southern Oregon, and they're all ready to drop everything and pivot if more fires break out.
The Rogue Valley Times team is small, but growing. They started five months ago, sharing a conference table. Now they've moved into a historic bank building in the heart of downtown Medford.
"This is one of the marquee intersections in downtown Medford," said David Sommers, the paper's publisher. "And as we were outgrowing our first office which was three blocks from here, it was really important to us to stay in the heart of downtown."
Even though he's the head of this enterprise, it's a startup, so he ends up wearing a lot of hats.
"I have tools in my desk because it's easier for me to go fix the stuck lock than it is to go bring in a locksmith sometimes," he said.
Sommers said that this central location is part of an effort to restore what was lost when Medford's Mail Tribune suddenly closed up shop back in January.
"The Medford Mail Tribune newspaper had been around for over 100 years," Sommers said. "This was the community's chronicle of our history."
The paper went through a number of ownership changes in recent years, and former staff members say it got worse with each new owner — culminating in the last one.
"The paper didn't die, it was killed," said Smigelski, who was formerly editor of the Mail Tribune.
From 2017 up until its demise, the Mail Tribune was owned by Steven Saslow and incorporated into his Rosebud Media company. Under Saslow, Rosebud experimented with focusing on video over articles, Smigelski said, an effort to lure in a younger demographic. But it didn't work. And after the company repeatedly slashed down the paper's physical product until it was online-only, the Mail Tribune's staff ultimately received just two days' notice that the paper was going to close in January.
Its closure left a void in southern Oregon, and with it a lingering question: who is going to cover the news?
"This is the largest city between San Francisco and Eugene, and Portland or Boise to the east," Smigelski said. "Southern Oregon, the Rogue Valley, Medford, Jackson County, this is a community that has a passion for local news."
Medford still has television news stations — three, until the recent disintegration of Sinclair-owned KTVL, which had hitched its wagon to the Mail Tribune in a number of ways, leaving KDRV and KOBI — and a public radio station. But the Mail Tribune was the last local newspaper for a metropolitan area of 223,000 people.
Holding back the desert
The loss of the Mail Tribune left Medford on the cusp of becoming the latest of many "news deserts," as a growing number of local newspapers have foundered. Northwestern University reports that 360 newspapers have shut down in the U.S. just since the end of 2019, most of them serving small communities.
An estimated 75,000 journalists worked in newspapers back in 2006. That number has shrunk to 31,000, according to the same study. About 70 million Americans live in a county with either no local news organizations or only one.
But in Medford, efforts began almost immediately to ensure that it did not become yet another news desert. In nearby Grants Pass, the publisher of the Daily Courier announced that he'd be making efforts to expand and hire on staff laid off by the Mail Tribune.
And within weeks, plans were in motion to start a brand new paper from the ground up in Medford, backed by Oregon-based EO Media. The company owns about 15 other publications, including the Bend Bulletin and the East Oregonian. This new publication became the Rogue Valley Times.
Dave Smigelski had been thinking about retirement. But it didn't take long for him to change his mind — he signed on as editor and hired the news staff, many of them his colleagues from the Mail Tribune.
"All of the people who are out there said yes before I had the ask out of my mouth," he said.
Smigelski said they're committed to bringing back journalism that serves the community; local coverage of events, arts and entertainment, sports and deep investigations.
On his team is investigative reporter Buffy Pollock, who worked for the Mail Tribune for more than 20 years.
"As soon as they called I was like, 'Yes, absolutely,'" she said.
With the Rogue Valley Times, Pollock has been able to spend weeks reporting on the death of a caregiver — the circumstances of which had somehow gone unnoticed and unremarked.
"We found out this woman had been attacked and died as a result of her job and nothing happened," Pollock said. "We dug into that story — the police didn't know about it, the state didn't know about it, the county didn't know about it — and so our reporting brought to light the fact that her death had occurred, number one, and then number two, we were able to document numerous injuries on other employees (at) this company by the person who was accused of injuring and killing Bobbie."
Sommers said that this story is going to have an impact at the state level, the kind that he's proud to watch.
"These are journalists that have decades-long relationships, who have built sources and are wired into this community in a way that I am in awe of," he said.
It's the kind of work that you can only do if you live here and know the landscape the way they do.
"With what's happening in Medford City Hall and Jackson County Commission, Ashland City Council, we have to be there to cover that, nobody can helicopter in to do that."
Sommers said that the community is happy to have the coverage as well. The Times has gotten a lot of positive feedback, which isn't always the case when you work in the news. And, in an age when we get most of our news online, even the paper's print edition has grown since it revived the physical product for this community.
That growth is tangible, not just theoretical, Sommers demonstrated. You can see it by simply comparing the size and heft of an earlier paper to one printed today.
The Story airs at 6:30 p.m. every weekday on KGW. Got a question or comment for the team? Shoot an email to thestory@kgw.com or call and leave a voicemail at 503-226-5090.