Peace House has been a proud midwife and sponsor of Ashland.News, having kept them under our fiscal umbrella in their first year of life. Congratulations to Bert Etling, the Editor in Chief, and the Ashland.news Board, who have believed in supporting community news and offering the life it deserves.
—The Peace House Staff and Board
By Dr. Herbert Rothschild, Ashland.news Founder
You may not know this story. On Dec. 16, 2021, those of us who had come together to create Ashland.news held a news conference to announce its launch, scheduled for the following month. A number of community leaders gave their blessing to the endeavor. (To see a video recording of the news conference, click here.)
State Sen. Jeff Golden, who spoke on that occasion, told us something I didn’t know — that over the years he had been party to conversations seeking a way to buy the Daily Tidings, which hadn’t been locally owned since 1980. Ownership had passed from one corporation to another, including Capital Cities-ABC, Disney, and Ottaway Newspapers Inc., which at that time was a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. How well Ashland was served by these absentee corporate interests varied, but in meaningful ways the Tidings hadn’t been Ashland’s newspaper long before its last corporate owner killed it.
As Jeff said, Ashland.news was the realization of those earlier aspirations. Actually, it went even further than what was previously understood as returning the city’s primary news source to local ownership. As a nonprofit, Ashland.news isn’t owned by anyone — not in the usual sense of that term. It belongs to the community.
Like ownership, the meaning of return on investment radically changes when a venture is nonprofit. Those of us who put up the seed money to launch Ashland.news measure our return, not in dollars, but in the number of people served, served in all the ways good local news publications serve their communities — fostering informed engagement, highlighting strengths and exposing deficiencies, enhancing civic self-consciousness, cohesion and pride.
Just as the Wall Street banks failed Main Street in 2008 and, in response, local savings flowed into local banks and credits unions, so too the failure of media conglomerates to serve cities like Ashland and Talent has given rise hundreds of nonprofit local news publications across the U.S.
On average, though, under 30% of their revenue comes from their readers, 50% from grants. Ashland.news is proud that two-thirds of our revenue comes from you, our readers. It confirms what I said before — that Ashland.news really is owned by the community.
If you haven’t yet claimed your stake in Ashland.news or reclaimed it this year, Giving Tuesday (today, Dec. 3) would be a fine time. Gifts made before the end of the year will be be doubled as part of the national NewsMatch campaign benefiting nonprofit journalism. Click here or send a check to P.O. Box 640, Ashland, OR 97520.
Herbert Rothschild
Founder, Ashland.news
