Cutler

Some bad news was delivered to the journalism world in Oregon earlier this month.

That bad news though, was quickly snuffed out.

One of the state’s oldest newspapers, the Medford Mail Tribune, ceased publication. Yet not long after, the Chieftain’s parent company, EO Media Group, announced it would start a new news organization in Medford and hire more than 10 journalists.

That’s the state of the newspaper industry nowadays, often a topsy-turvy world, but the news our parent company plans to set up in Medford is beyond encouraging and should be a shot in the arm for our industry in Oregon.

Medford can seem like a long way from Enterprise and Wallowa County, so the potential long-term implications of the closure of a newspaper like the Mail Tribune were hard to determine. But without a newspaper, the residents of the region faced some troubling times.

That’s because when a newspaper shutters, a bright, shining light of democracy is extinguished.

That should matter to every reader and to every voter.

The demise of a newspaper means the mechanism of county and city government no longer has a relatively neutral institution overlooking its practices. It means a community loses a mirror of itself, a place where information is delivered under the auspices of journalism ethics and values developed over a century.

Sure, there are plenty of sources of news on social media, but that type of information usually isn’t vetted and it is generally partisan where only a specific slice of data is delivered to readers.

That means readers don’t get the full picture. Instead, they get information that is usually either supercharged with rhetoric or just plain wrong. Either way democracy loses.

When the lights of a newspaper go dark, that also means a crucial element to our democracy — a watchdog over government — disappears. Increasingly, government has become more difficult to oversee and it is rare for a public official to willingly step up and deliver news he or she believes the public won’t like.

That’s where newspapers have always come in. A good newspaper is concerned about reporting the facts — as well as can be ascertained — to the readers. Whether those facts upset an elected official isn’t part of a good newspaper’s methodology. A good newspaper takes its watchdog role seriously and knows that readers, voters, are depending on it to give insight and perspective and information and not to be sensational. When that check, so to speak, vanishes, everyone in a democracy loses.

I feel confident, though, that EO Media’s decision to open a newspaper in Medford is not only a good one, but will pay off for the company and for readers down the road.

It’s the kind of decision that makes me proud to be part of such an organization as EO Media Group. I know our company is dedicated to providing the best news product possible to our readers.

It was frustrating to hear the Medford Mail Tribune was to close but it was very satisfying to see we are going to invest in that community.