NEWS
BY BOB KEEFER
THE REGISTER-
GUARD ’S NEW
OWNER
Eugene’s only daily newspaper faces
an uncertain future as part of a chain
T
he Register-Guard has been tight-lipped about
what’s in store at Eugene’s daily newspaper in
the wake of last week’s stunning news that the
corporate chain GateHouse Media has bought the
locally owned company and will take over opera-
tions next month.
Publisher Logan Molen, whose openness has been a
breath of fresh air at the usually reticent RG, declined to
say much when Eugene Weekly emailed several questions
last week.
“There’s not a whole lot I can say because the terms of
the contract are confidential,” he wrote. “GateHouse isn’t
scheduled to take over until March 1, so until then there’s
not a lot they likely will say, either.”
Molen said the purchase was not finalized until Jan. 24,
the day before it was announced to the RG staff and to the
public.
“Our staff is anxious about the future, which is com-
pletely understandable,” Molen wrote. “We’ll do what we
can to make a tough transition as smooth as possible, and
communicate what we can as quickly as we can.”
The staff may have reason to be anxious.
• We heard Oregon House Majority Leader Jennifer
Williamson talk to a gathering of Eugene Democrats last
summer after the 2017 legislative session. Williamson
said the accomplishments of Oregon progressives are
known all over the country, but hardly known at all in
Oregon. So isn’t that what the media should do, tell
Oregonians what their elected representatives
did? EW asked Diane Dietz, a highly respected
journalist who covered the session for the Statesman-
Journal last summer after a long career at the Register-
Guard, to give us her take on the success or failure of the
progressive agenda, plus a forecast for the 35-day 2018
session starting in February. Read the story of
government working in our little democracy, the state of
Oregon, in our legislative package this issue.
• As of March 1, Eugene Weekly will be Eugene’s only
locally owned independent major newspaper. That’s the
day when GateHouse Media out of New York state, one of
this country’s largest chains, officially owns The Register-
Guard. After 90 years of family ownership, the Bakers
sold it for an undisclosed amount. We have poked at the
RG and they have poked back, although their editors
mostly tried to ignore this free upstart on the streets for
the past 37 years. But we are sad to see the Baker family
giving up the institution they worked so hard to establish
and maintain. As their masthead says, their daily paper
has been a good “citizen of its community” and the
8
February 1, 2018 • eugeneweekly.com
GateHouse, a private equity firm that owns 130 news-
papers around the country, has been known for substantial
layoffs at papers it’s bought, outsourcing everything from
page design to printing.
One thing that remains unclear about the RG sale — and
one of the questions Molen declined to answer for Eugene
Weekly — is whether the purchase is of an operating com-
pany or an asset sale, meaning that GateHouse can re-open
current union contracts. It appears the latter may be the
case.
“They [GateHouse] like to come in and sell off physi-
cal assets,” said Bernie Lunzer, the national president of
the NewsGuild-Communication Workers of America, the
union that represents about 64 of the RG’s 240 full- and
part-time employees. “They tend to strip things down to
the basics.”
About 20 RG workers are represented by the Teamsters
union.
Perhaps the most damning criticism of GateHouse
came in a lengthy article published in December by Rob-
ert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of American Pros-
pect, and “Hildy Zenger,” the nom de plume of a journalist
working at a small-city newspaper owned by GateHouse.
The article, headlined “Saving the Free Press From Pri-
vate Equity,” offers such chilling observations as this:
“Its pre-GateHouse staff has been cut by 70 percent,
and those who remain have not had a raise in almost 10
years. The paper had its own in-house production and
printing operation, and had won design awards, but Gate-
House shut down and sold the press and fired the entire
production staff.”
Bakers have been good citizens as well. What happens
next? Logan Molen, present publisher of the RG, already
has written that the paper will shrink. The crucial number
is GateHouse’s debt of more than $300 million and what
they must do to service it.
In a column published in the newspaper Sunday, Jan.
28, Molen said the RG will retain the ability to “drive the
journalistic and business mission” in ways appropriate to the
community.
The American Prospect story paints a bleaker picture of
life at a GateHouse newspaper.
Take the website. “Although GateHouse management
claims to be aggressively pursuing a ‘hyperlocal’ digital ad
strategy,” the article says, “its newspapers’ websites — all
with close to identical design — are stunningly ugly, hard
to use, and filled with dated, soft feature stories of zero local
interest.”
In his Sunday column, Molen confirmed that the news-
paper’s website will soon “migrate onto the … template that
GateHouse uses for its newspaper websites nationwide.”
TNG-CWA’s Lunzer, though, said GateHouse is not
among the worst of the private equity firms that have been
buying up newspapers around the country as collapsing ad-
vertising revenues have pushed them towards insolvency.
GateHouse, he said, “still claims to have a commitment
to journalism.”
TNG-CWA has successfully negotiated contract issues at
about a dozen papers the corporation owns and has found
GateHouse amenable to negotiating non-economic issues
such as union recognition.
“In our relationship with GateHouse we are trying to ed-
ucate them about why journalism is so important and why it
matters to the community,” Lunzer said. “There’s this myth
out there that newspapers are dead. That’s not true.”
Eugene Weekly Arts Editor Bob Keefer worked as a reporter at The Register-
Guard for 30 years before retiring from the paper in 2013.
with the right resources can save taxpayers millions. City
Accountability has a fundraiser, Blues for Ballot Measure
20-283, planned for 7 pm Friday, Feb. 2, at Tsunami
Books.
• We left the City Club of Eugene meeting Jan. 26 even
more convinced that we need single payer health care in
this country. Ryan Kounovsky, a staffer to Rep. Phil
Barnhart during the 2017 legislative session, talked
about what’s next for the Oregon Health Plan. Certainly,
Oregon is trying hard to take care of the medical needs of
its residents, but a “Medicare for all” plan from the
national level makes the most sense. It seems unlikely
with the present control in D.C., but that will change.
• Eugene Symphony’s former conductor and music
director Marin Alsop has long been a superstar on the
international stage. Since leaving here she’s become the
first woman music director at a major U.S. symphony
orchestra — the Baltimore Symphony — and the first
woman to conduct the BBC’s prestigious Last Night of the
Proms in London. Now Alsop has been named artistic
director of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in
Austria — and yes, that’s another musical first for women.
Brava!
• The Eugene City Council is looking to refer a
competing city auditor measure to the May ballot, but it
will be drafted by the anti-auditor city manager and city
attorney, so expect it to have an inadequate budget at
best, and correspondingly little impact. Citizens for
Sensible Oversight, who kick-started this effort, complain
that Measure 20-283 already on the ballot is too
expensive and would cost taxpayers “nearly $700,000
every year,” but Eugene Police Auditor Mark Gissiner
notes in a recent Register-Guard op-ed that his budget is
$530,000 “or less than 1 cent per capita per day.” The
Measure 20-283 auditor and his or her staff would have
vastly more responsibility and impact than the police
auditor. Eugene is becoming a real city and we need well-
funded and substantial independent auditing of all city
departments. Police auditors cost money; city auditors
• Oregon Bach Festival is mum on why it invited a
guest conductor who had been previously fired for using
a racial slur at a rehearsal to perform at this summer’s
festival, just months after OBF sacked its artistic director,
Matthew Halls, amid vague suggestions of racism and
sexism. Cellist and conductor Jaap ter Linden was to
conduct OBF’s Berwick Academy July 3; he was let go
from a guest slot by the Oberlin Conservatory in 2015
after students complained he had used the slur, according
to news reports confirmed by a conservatory official. Ter
Linden’s name disappeared from the OBF website the
day after Eugene Weekly posted a story online Jan. 26
about the incident; requests for comment to the festival
and the University of Oregon drew no response by press
time. Ter Linden has reached out to EW on the topic, and
we'll post an interview with him on our website.