Highway 58 Herald logo on the office building in Oakridge. (Mathias Lehman-Winters/Emerald)
Along Highway 58 and 40 miles southeast of Eugene lies the small city of Oakridge. In 2020, Oakridge’s longtime local paper, the Dead Mountain Echo, went out of business, leaving Oakridge and the surrounding area with no source of local news.
That’s when community members banded together to form a new online news publication, the Highway 58 Herald.
Led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Oakridge native and UO graduate Doug Bates, the Herald was up and running by February 2021, less than six months after the Dead Mountain Echo closed.
“They had shuttered their doors about six months prior. So there was a point of no newspaper in town,” Herald co-founder and interim editor George Custer said. “And a couple of the residents here said, ‘You know, there’s going to be some shady stuff in the city government here, and we need to do something about it.’”
When Bates retired from the Herald eight months after its founding, Custer took over. A retired 15-year veteran of the Marine Corps, Custer said that he keeps the title of “Interim” Editor, to remind himself that he’s supposed to be retired and finding a replacement.
“I have a wife and am supposed to have a life, supposed to be sort of retired, but I gotta keep it going,” Custer said. “It needs to be here.”
Custer said that in the Herald’s first publication, they learned that the Oakridge City council was trying to push out then-city manager and retired rear admiral Bryan Cutchen with no just cause.
“It was total cronyism,” Custer said.
In part because of an outpouring of public support following the Herald’s article, Cutchen got his contract as city manager extended and now serves as Mayor of Oakridge.
Custer said that one of the biggest challenges for the Herald is finding and retaining good journalistic talent. Many of the Heralds’ writers are not trained journalists, but community members who choose to write for the Herald as volunteers.
This trend of community based volunteer journalism is not unique to Oakridge, either.
Regina Lawrence is the associate Dean of the UO School of Journalism in Portland, and research director of the Agora Journalism Center — a group focused on community centered journalism and blistering local news.
“Quite often, there’s a growing number of folks who are retirees, you know, they’re retired journalists, and they’re volunteering or doing this local journalism for very little pay,” Lawrence said. “At the same time, there’s a growing movement around using citizens to cover local public meetings … because there’s so many journalism jobs that have been lost.”
Lawrence said that there is a crisis in local news coverage across the country at the moment, and that as a result of economic pressures many local newspapers have been forced to either reduce their staff size, or go out of business entirely.
This creates a situation where “news deserts” emerge, and news that is important to a community goes uncovered or is covered inaccurately.
The Herald covers a variety of local news that otherwise would not be widely reported on. Custer expressed his sentiment that often bigger media outlets, particularly those from the Eugene/Springfield area, rarely pay them any attention.
“Places like this, they’ll want to come out here if somebody dies a tragic death or, you know, a bank burns down. It’s only just the ambulance-chasing type news,” Custer said. “Are they going to come down here when a store changes hands or do a spotlight on a community member who’s given a lifetime of devotion to helping the poor? Never going to see that.”
Custer is far from the only Oakridge resident who feels that if it weren’t for the Herald, issues that matter in Oakridge would not be getting reported on.
Jacqui Lomont owns the Mane Street Coffee House in downtown Oakridge and has lived in the city for almost 20 years.
“It’s a bit of a news desert here, for sure,” Lomont said. “The Register-Guard is worthless these days. So getting that as a paper anymore doesn’t do anybody any good. And they never really covered much in Oakridge anyway, except if it was something tragic. Never good news. Always the worst news.”
Lomont is appreciative of the Herald’s coverage of local topics, particularly ones that haven’t gotten much coverage outside of Oakridge, like the plans by Oregon entrepreneur and winery operator Ed King to turn the historic TV Butte, which sits next to Oakridge, into a quarry.
“It’s a big deal in this town,” Lomont said. “Why would you go clear across the county to somebody else’s town and destroy their town? Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
King is the owner of King Estate Winery and a financial backer of Old Hazeldell Quarry, a company that seeks to develop a portion of TV Butte into a gravel mine and crushing site to provide andesite rock for highwayconstruction. TV Butte itself comprises 183 acres owned by Crown Properties, a trust of the King family. Old Hazeldell has, since as far back as 2015, been petitioning the Lane County to rezone 107 acres of the property from “forest” land to “natural resource” land, which would permit the mining operation.
However, the proposed quarry, which would be expected to operate for 35-50 years, has for years faced backlash from the community over concerns about noise, decreased air quality, contaminated groundwater and the destruction of an elk calving habitat. The native Molalla people have also expressed pushback over the quarry plans, as TV Butte is reportedly the site of an ancient Molalla tribal village.
In 2021, the Lane County Board of Commissioners voted in a 3-2 decision to deny King’s application for a zoning change that would permit the quarry. However, many residents in Oakridge, including Lomont, believe that the battle to save TV Butte is far from over.
Since King’s defeat in 2021, he has contributed $12,000 and $10,000 to the campaigns of county commissioners Ryan Ceniga and Pat Farr respectively. Lomont worries that this means that when King tries to get the land rezoned again, he’ll have enough commissioners “in his pocket” to get his way.
Lomont believes that if it weren’t for the Herald, the affair surrounding TV Butte would go widely unreported by the media.
“We don’t see it really in the Register-Guard. I mean, you don’t really see it in the Eugene Weekly … For the most part, you won’t hear about it anywhere except in Oakridge,” Lomont said.
Joy Kingsbury is a Herald co-founder, board member and contributor. It was at her behest that, back in 2021, Bates agreed to help found the paper.
“I started meeting with Doug and begging him to help me do something about a newspaper. And finally, he was convinced,” Kingsbury said.
Kingsbury said that the King Estate has come back for a second time with a proposition to open a quarry on TV Butte. But this time around, she’s worried that the community won’t be able to fend him off.
“I imagine that with their power and their money … unless we can find some really powerful opposition, they will prevail, Kinsbury said. “And I believe, and many of us believe, it will ruin our city.”
Despite the Herald’s comprehensive coverage of the local area, it still faces daunting challenges.
Deretta Huey is a volunteer at the Oakridge Public Library and sits on the city council in Westfir, Oakridge’s neighboring city of just 259 residents.
Huey said that she reads the Herald and that it is “nice to have a local paper.” But the digital format of the Herald presents a learning curve for her and many other older residents.
“One thing that’s bad about [the Herald] being online is that, especially for older people, it’s not as accessible to them,” Huey said. “My husband doesn’t even carry a cell phone.”
Custer recognizes that a lot of residents would prefer a paper version of the Herald, but at the moment, that is just not financially feasible.
“We’re an older community here, and they say, ‘I just miss my newspaper.’ And yeah, I understand that. I do too,” Custer said.“Wanting it and us being able to pay for it, you know, paying for it is another thing.”
Starting in June 2023, the Herald ran three bimonthly print editions before returning to its online-only format.
“We board members have been contributing a lot of money, or as much as we possibly can, to the paper, so we’ve been able to stay afloat. But it was pretty rickety right now,” Kingsbury said. “We’re not in good financial condition. And so we’re all really, really looking for donations.” We have what we call a paywall now, and we’re hopeful that that’s going to bring in donors and subscribers.”
Kingsbury said that she believes the role the Herald plays is absolutely vital, because every community needs to have a base of trustworthy information in order to know what is happening in their city and their community.
“We all just do the best we can, you know, with the time that we have to spare,” Kingsbury said. “There are just a handful of us.”
Custer and Kinsbury say that if someone really wanted to help the Herald, they can donate, subscribe or write for them. Their entire staff of journalists is made up of community volunteers, and they aim to cover the whole Highway 58 corridor from Lowell to Crescent.
