Some 15 Farmall tractors entered by Dennis Henderson made for an unusual display July 4, 2024, during Wallowa's annual Independence Day parade.

I’m turning over part of this week’s newsletter to the editor of the East Oregonian, Phil Wright, so that he can offer additional insight into the regional edition of the EO, the first issue of which arrived last week in your mailbox. (The second edition, of course, will arrive in your mailbox this week.)

Here’s Wright’s report:

The first regional East Oregonian print edition is out the door, and we’re well into planning next week’s.

Getting here was tough — there’s no way to sugarcoat that — but we applied suggestions from readers to make the EO a truly regional paper. We held a “postmortem,” if you will, to go over what we can do better going forward and to emphasize what to keep on doing.

After announcing the EO would change to a regional paper with content from the Wallowa County Chieftain, the Hermiston Herald, the Observer, the Baker City Herald, and the Blue Mountain Eagle — and especially in the wake of the EO Media Group’s decision to stop producing printed editions of the Chieftain, the Observer, the Eagle and the two Heralds — we heard from a few subscribers expressing skepticism about whether we would represent their communities in print.

We took that seriously and had news from throughout Northeastern Oregon in the paper.

We nixed dedicating pages to news from a given county. Instead, we decided the most significant news and the news with the best photo packages get priority and go on the front page. From there, we covered our inside pages with news from local government coverage to features on interesting people, no matter the county.

That was just the A section. We have a section for Outdoors & Recreation and a section for Business & Agriculture. The EO continues to carry the weekly Go Eastern Oregon magazine — which last week featured the Chieftain’s story on Summer Fishtrap — but also now includes the monthly Eastern Oregon Parent magazine. As Blue Mountain Eagle editor Bennett Hall said, this paper has a “thump” factor now.

All of this, however, remains a work in progress. You, our readers, remain our most important critics, so please share your thoughts about this new regional paper with us. If we can make the EO better, we will. (Email comments to editor@wallowa.com.)

Going regional also means your digital subscription access has been expanded to include the Wallowa County Chieftain, the East Oregonian, the La Grande Observer, the Hermiston Herald, the Baker City Herald, the Wallowa County Chieftain, and the Blue Mountain Eagle.

For all digital access:

• Simply register your account on every site you wish to read with the same email address and password you currently use.

• Once you’ve registered, enter your username and password to enjoy the full range of content on that news site.

• You should not have to login again unless you log out, clear history or experience software updates.

• Save your password when prompted by your browser and if you are inadvertently logged out, your browser can fill in your login and password for you. (Only use this option on your personal digital devices.)

To view the latest e-editions, be sure to register your account and sign in to www.eastoregonian.com.

Sign up for e-newsletters from each website by going to the “Email lists” link on your account dashboard for each site.

Thank you for supporting local journalists in Eastern Oregon.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact us at 800-781-3214 or email support@eomediagroup.com.

Phil Wright

Editor, East Oregonian

My thanks go out to Phil and to other other editors working on the regional newspaper — Hall, at the Blue Mountain Eagle, and Jayson Jacoby at the Baker City Herald.

In the meantime, the Chieftain’s newsroom is working on a batch of fresh stories this week. Some will appear in the print edition; others will appear only online.

Here’s a sampling:

• It looks as if Northeastern Oregon will be scorched this week with temperatures in the 90s and 100s. We’ve been tracking the heat advisories being issued (and updated daily) by the National Weather Service. Typically, I write this newsletter on Sunday afternoons with a 5 p.m. deadline, so here’s the most recent information from the Weather Service — but I’ll have the story updated Monday morning, so this link should give you the latest.

• Working Homes LLC, the subsidiary of Wallowa Resources that’s working on housing issues in the county, had big news last week: It’s completed the purchase of the historic EM&M Building in downtown Enterprise, a move which should keep the building’s 27 apartments affordable as workforce housing and for retirees. 

• We’ll check in with how it went for the July 4 “Shake the Lake” fireworks event at Wallowa Lake. The event went on as scheduled, even though organizers struggled a bit to foot the increasingly expensive bill for the pyrotechnics.

• The July 4 Wallowa Parade Fourth of July parade drew a big crowd, as usual, and nearly 50 entries. One unique float came from Wellens General Contractors, which built a storage shed while on the parade route; the shed was raffled off at the end of the parade. Reporter Bill Bradshaw was on hand to document the event.

• A regular meeting of the Wallowa County Board of Commissioners last week turned into a wide-ranging discussion of economic development in the county, as a representative of Business Oregon, the state’s business-development agency, came calling to pitch a plan for business retention. Bradshaw has this report about the meeting.

• And the Chieftain’s website, wallowa.com, is the only place to collect the third clue to the location of the one-of-a-kind medallion that’s been hidden somewhere on public lands in Wallowa County. That clue will be posted right at 7 a.m. Wednesday. If you’re out hunting for the medallion during the heat advisory, use caution and hydrate early and often.

All of this is part of our commitment to provide as much Wallowa County coverage as we possibly can. 

If you haven’t already, this is a good time to take a moment to register your subscription for digital access to the Chieftain. Call 541-963-3161 to talk to a member of our customer service staff, who will be happy to walk you through the process. It’s easy, takes just a few moments to set up and allows you to take advantage of the East Oregonian’s e-edition, app and website delivery along with your print subscription. (The online edition also features a big selection of puzzles available only to subscribers.)

And let me clue you in on a new feature on our website that should help subscribers who are experiencing problems logging in. On the right side of the top navigation bar, you’ll see a “?” Click on it, and you’ll go to our new Help Center, designed specifically to help subscribers who are experiencing problems logging in. Log-in problems are a pain, and we’re hoping this feature helps you if you experience those. 

Finally, let me take this opportunity to once again thank the Chieftain’s subscribers: It would be impossible for us to do this vital work without your support.

Mike McInally is the editor of the Wallowa County Chieftain. You can email him at editor@wallowa.com or mmcinally@wallowa.com.