Farewell to readers: The Herald is here to stay, and now it’s time for raising funds, hiring an editor

By DOUG BATES/Editor Emeritus/The Herald — My apologies, but I used the wrong word last month when I announced my “retirement” as editor of Highway 58 Herald.

How can I be retiring? I never really accepted the job. I agreed to help create The Herald, not run it.

My actual retirement from the news business was almost exactly 12 years ago. My swan song appeared in The Oregonian newspaper in Portland on Nov. 21, 2009. There’s no reason to write another one, so I’m republishing it below, with permission from The Oregonian.

The Herald, as I reported on Oct. 7, is moving forward to a new phase. The timing is right, because the volunteer organization has just received Internal Revenue Service certification as a 501(c)3 nonprofit entity, which means the donations it receives are fully tax-deductible. And that is true retroactively to The Herald’s launch in February.

Within hours of receiving the federal nonprofit status, The Herald received a $1,000 donation through the Oregon Community Foundation. (Profuse thank-yous to the Fredrick and Stephanie Wagner Family Fund.) It is this kind of philanthropy that will enable The Herald to survive.

In its first eight months of publication, The Herald has received somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 in contributions from readers and perhaps twice that in cash, equipment and materials from its volunteer board members. They include Oakridge businesswoman Joy Kingsbury, who has been providing The Herald’s offices rent-free at the building she owns at 47581 Highway 58.

I and my colleague Dean Rea have also donated several hundred hours of journalism that would have cost a newspaper like The Register-Guard upwards of $75,000 for the same period. Several volunteer “community journalists” have contributed their efforts as well.

Now The Herald must use its new federal nonprofit status to raise bigger money — grants and charitable contributions that can support the hiring of one and preferably two trained journalists to replace the volunteer “Doug and Dean Show.”

The Herald has already begun the search for a new editor/reporter. Until the position is filled, The Herald will need to shift gears and slow down a little.

But that doesn’t mean halting publication. I know that The Herald’s remaining board members — Joy Kingsbury, George Custer and Susan Knudsen Obermeyer — won’t let that happen.

They know that a town can’t thrive without dependable community journalism. Please be patient with them, keep donating and stay optimistic about prospects of The Herald and the communities it serves.

Interested in the editing job? It requires living in Oakridge-Westfir and having training in journalism. The hours are long, the pay will be modest and the rewards are immeasurable. Whoever gets the job will be at the cutting edge of an experimental new way of providing community journalism in a world where the for-profit model no longer works.

The Herald’s board will meet Monday, Nov. 15, to work out details of what comes next. You’ll be able to read about that here. Meanwhile, it’s time for me to say farewell, using the exact same words I typed on Nov. 21, 2009:

Leaving the newspaper: Autumn in the world of ink on paper

By DOUG BATES/The Oregonian — I never knew A.D. Kern, but I know what he did for a living, and I know what happened to his handiwork 82 years ago right outside my Portland house.

Last Sunday, the scritch-scratch of my rake exposed his name, embedded in the sidewalk: “A.D. KERN 1927.” Under nearby leaves, I found the tracks of a dog that had trotted across his newly poured concrete.

All those years ago the sight probably didn’t please A.D., but it makes me smile every time I see it. Our vintage Northeast neighborhood is a place of many lucky dogs, including two Scotties, a golden retriever, several poodles, a blue heeler, a Bernese mountain dog, a French bulldog and one old newshound who lives where Mr. Kern’s sidewalk got permanently marked by paws in 1927.

The English-style cottage has been the perfect home for a newspaper writer. It will not, however, be the perfect home for a former newspaper writer. It feels like autumn in this business — late autumn, actually — and for me it’s time for new words and a new place to assemble them.

Leaving The Oregonian is painful in many ways. This place is one of the West’s institutional treasures, and I have many good friends here. Yet, in so many other ways leaving is an easy decision.

This newspaper, like Mount St. Helens, will survive the explosive forces that are shaking the entire industry. Like the mountain, however, The Oregonian will look different after the ashes settle, and that will require the creative talents and fresh thinking of many smart people.

The brightest among them will have pixels flowing in their veins, not the inky black stuff of my generation. Yes, of course, an old Doug can learn new tricks, but is that really the right path in this late season of life?

I’ve thought about this a lot lately while raking leaves, something I enjoy in early fall but not after the rains bring down the soggy malingerers. On Sunday I got rid of them — piles of wet, slimy leaves that stayed too long, far past their charm as colorful fall decor.

Journalists shouldn’t hang around too long, either. This business chews up its old. In the blink of an eye, a battle-scarred veteran can become about as respected as a pile of wet leaves. One minute you’re Dan Rather, and the next you’re . . . Dan Rather.

It’s tricky, though. When is it time to leave? When is it too soon? How many words are enough?

The answer, I know, lies in every newspaper writer’s attic, basement or storage closet: When you quit saving your clippings, it’s probably time to move on.

I blush at the thought of how long it’s been since I clipped and saved something I wrote for the paper. It’s a sad day for the muse when you lose that affection for the words that serve as tools of your trade.

To get that feeling back, I need to say farewell forever to newspaper words like “filibuster,” “kicker” and “biennium.” Instead, I need to start trying out new ones — words like “rime.”

Rime isn’t a good newspaper word. Few people use it or even know what it means. It’s a type of white ice sometimes seen on trees in wintry weather, and last weekend a majestic cloak of rime coated Dead Mountain in the Cascades near Oakridge.

In a couple of days, my wife and I will move there. The house sits high on a meadow bordered by ancient forest in rural Lane County, where the two of us met as 16-year-olds. All of our best stories and colorful characters are rooted there in the shadow of Dead Mountain, a good place for a different kind of writing.

Part of me wishes it were named something a little less unsettling, like “Longevity Mountain,” but that’s the thing about life. You don’t get to choose all the words.

I, however, got to choose a lot of them in four decades of newspaper work. Most of my words are still hanging around like autumn leaves, printed in ink on yellowing news pages — stacks and stacks of clippings stored in dusty boxes in the basement.

In a couple of days the movers will come and haul those boxes to our new home. While packing I opened the one marked “Eugene clips” and found that mice had nested there, apparently years ago. Was it at the Seattle house? San Diego? Bend? Portland?

No matter. Most of the nibbled pages were still legible. I browsed for a while, occasionally wincing at the prose of a much younger, less disciplined version of myself. Perhaps, I suggested to my wife, the crumbling old papers weren’t worth yet another move. Maybe they should be recycled instead, an idea she quickly rejected. The grandchildren might want to read them someday, she said.

Yes, and trees might sprout someday on the rocky face of Dead Mountain. What, I asked, are the odds our grandchildren would ever want to read those old newspapers? They don’t even read freshly printed ones.

They like their words to arrive in something other than ink. I’ve accepted that, and I’m confident that the talented colleagues I leave behind will master whatever alchemy it takes to turn those younger readers into customers.

The Oregonian, at more than 150 years old, is Oregon’s oldest continuously operating business. I revere this paper and the people who work here and what they stand for. I’m counting on them to keep the tradition going and make the new product even better than the old one.

I’ll like it even better if they can make it truly everlasting — not like the fading pages in my basement but like the indelible prints of the Portland dog that once trotted across wet concrete.

Associate Editor Doug Bates retired from The Oregonian last week after 41 years of working at West Coast daily newspapers.