Highway 58 Herald: Greetings From the founding editor

Small-Town Volunteers Coming Together to Shine Light Into Darkness

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Highway 58 Herald founding editor Doug Bates retired from the position on Oct. 26, his 75th birthday. He stepped down from the nonprofit’s board of directors on Feb. 12, 2022.)

By DOUG BATES/For The Herald — Congratulations. You have found your way to a humble and, I hope, an auspicious new experiment in Oregon journalism.

Highway 58 Herald is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization founded by yours truly and a handful of volunteers at the dawn of 2021 to provide professional news reporting and vital information as a free service to communities along one of Oregon’s busiest mountain highways.

We have come together to fill a glaring news vacuum in a beautiful landscape where traditional media aren’t just withering but are vanishing altogether.

This is unacceptable. I don’t know about you, but I need reliable news. I need it to help me participate fully in my community. I need it to help me keep my family safe in times of emergency. And I need it to serve as a watchdog over my local government.

Here in Oakridge, where I grew up and have lived in retirement for more than a decade, our local weekly newspaper shut down in the fall of 2020 after a half-century of publication. Eugene’s daily paper no longer provides regular, dependable coverage of our community, and neither do the Eugene TV stations. Who will keep us informed now? That’s the question that brought me out of retirement.

How Often Will the Site Be Updated? How Do I Subscribe or Donate?

Those are the “Big Three” questions we’re getting. Our news pages will be updated every day — multiple times when necessary. We’re a free service so you don’t need to subscribe. And you can help us survive by looking for the menu item called “DONATE.”

A Ribbon of Asphalt Connecting Diverse Oregon Communities

Highway 58 Herald is headquartered in Oakridge but we aspire to provide news of the entire 87-mile length of Highway 58. It is our great unifier. All of the 25,000-plus Oregonians who live in this corridor – stretching from the eastern outskirts of Eugene through Pleasant Hill, Dexter, Lowell, Oakridge and Westfir to the Willamette Pass and beyond – rely on this ribbon of asphalt every day for transportation to work, school and home.

At various times of the year, our highway becomes Oregon’s busiest freight truck route and tourist pathway between Oregon and California, but there’s even more that unites us: We all live at the headwaters of the mighty Willamette River, and our scenic corridor provides passage for America’s major West Coast railroad, serving Union Pacific and Amtrak.

Our name is a bit of a mouthful, so you’ll see me refer to it as “The Herald” for short. Our founding board likes to call itself “Team Herald.”

Giving Real Meaning to the Word ‘Stimulus’

The start-up costs have been a moving target.  Members of Team Herald and their families have donated close to $4,000 of their federal stimulus checks to get this service going. We’re learning as we go and remain committed to reporting our financials to you fully and transparently as they come into focus.

Nobody on our board will ever make a dime from The Herald – we’re applying to become a nonprofit. It exists as a community service and nothing more. This is an experiment to see whether volunteers can provide local journalism that the private sector can no longer produce.

Would You Like to Help?

Once we achieve our nonprofit status we will aggressively seek donations and grants to help pay for web maintenance, freelance news reporting and related newsroom expenses. A modest amount of advertising will help, too, and we have arranged for an Oregon-based company to handle that for us. Eventually, I hope, The Herald will be able to compensate correspondents and hire an editor to sustain the operation and help me return to the retired life.

In the meantime, I will be looking for volunteer correspondents in the communities we serve. If you’re interested drop me a line at [email protected]. There is no pay yet – we’re nonprofit, remember – so the reward is your byline and the sweet satisfaction of knowing you’re doing something good for your community. As a bonus, you will receive free fast-track journalism tutoring from former newspaper editors like me who have a lifetime of experience in the field.

Volunteer correspondents need no prior news-gathering experience. However, they must have a good grasp of the English language, a love of writing and a willingness to learn and embrace the highest principles of good journalism. The Herald is built upon those principles, and you can read about them here.