Lookout Eugene-Springfield launch update: District 4J conversations, Oregon’s deepening local news crisis

It’s been a fast and busy month of community connection, as we get Lookout Eugene-Springfield ready for launch. We’ve begun meeting with community group members, with schools, with the business community and seen a great launch of our Lookout in the Classroom Lane County Support Fund. Highlights below.

And we want to wish you all good holidays as we wrap up 2024. We’ll be back in touch in the new year.

Also, please note that this update was first sent to our growing newsletter list. We’ll keep these updates coming with launch news and hires so please be sure to sign-up if you are not already subscribed.

LOOKOUT IN THE CLASSROOM

Our Lookout in the Classroom program is off to a great start – with a big boost from dozens of generous Lane County donors. Lookout in the Classroom brings local news to high school students, along with lots of interactive learning materials, quizzes, lesson plans and the like. Adapted from Lookout’s highly successful program in Santa Cruz County – which serves more than half of public high school students and more than 100 teachers – the Eugene-Springfield program is now in rapid formation.

Lookout Community and Student Engagement Manager Amanda Coers had great talks with District 4J Chief of Staff Carmen Xiomara Urbina, Communications Director Kelly McIver and Director of High School Education Greg Borgerding. They talked about implementation, focusing on aligning the program with Oregon State standards and incorporating social emotional learning (SEL) techniques into the curriculum to better support teachers and students. And good talks are ongoing with the Bethel district as well.

As we get the program rolling, community contributions are already helping push it along. We launched our online support page in late November. Astoundingly, we’ve seen 69 supporters donate already, raising $13,880 online, with the contributions going both toward our launch and the student program. In addition, we’ve received another $27,500 in specific contributions to the Lookout in the Classroom program through other sources. Thank you all so much, and we’ll keep in touch with our progress in each newsletter.

As we get ready for the new year, we’re already booking talks with community groups, and will outline that schedule after the first of the year. If your group would like to talk with Amanda or have us speak to your group, please let her know.

MEETING BUSINESSES

Lookout Eugene-Springfield Advertising Manager Morgana Dundon has been familiarizing local ad agencies and businesses with Lookout – contact her here – and attending large and small gatherings. Of particular interest is a recent Collaborative EDO (CEDO) Pub Talk in November. Pub Talks provide attendees with insights into the “unpredictable and often surprising path of entrepreneurship.” CEDO programs and initiatives are designed to foster urban development, for Eugene-Springfield and nearby rural areas.

The event, called The Accidental Entrepreneur, took place at Heritage Distilling Company and provided a networking environment for local entrepreneurs, with around 20 attending. The focus: how entrepreneurs turn unplanned moments into thriving ventures.

At Lookout, we’ll be focusing coverage on local business in new ways, with deeper and wider coverage, and with a particular interest in economic development, small and large.

OREGON’S DEEPENING LOCAL NEWS CRISIS

In Oregon, the pressures on local news here have been building, as they have nationally, for almost 20 years, as the old print daily models have tattered. You’ve all seen that locally, and now it’s happening more rapidly throughout the state. The overall loss of journalists is stunning, and is getting worse.

In Oregon, these losses have been exacerbated by the sale of two prominent Oregon-based media companies to the Alabama-based Carpenter Media Group (CMG), itself part of a complicated hedge fund play that sacrifices newspapers’ community missions for their last profits. In June, CMG bought Portland-based Pamplin Media, publisher of the Portland Tribune and 23 other papers. Then, in October, it closed on its purchase of the last family-owned group in the state, the Forrester-family owned (for four generations) EO Media Company. EO Media’s reach across the state — from Bend and Medford/Ashland to Astoria and Pendleton, as well as much of eastern Oregon — has been profound. So the crisis in local news statewide is now several magnitudes greater.

Here’s our further take on the recent happenings. And we’ll keep you all apprised over time, as we intend that Lookout and other such ventures will step into those community vacuums.

Other than our own launch, we have some other good news on that front.

The Oregon Journalism Project is launching, and will be publishing soon. It’s a small, but potentially powerful, nonprofit operation focused on digging deeply into stories that hold power accountable. It is an initiative “inspired by other similar ventures across the country,” including The Seattle Times’ civically funded journalism lab, Searchlight New Mexico and Spotlight PA.

Mark Zusman, longtime editor of Portland’s Willamette Week, is the founder and director of OJP, and Willamette Week’s Nigel Jaquiss, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting, will help lead its work. You can read more about who’s involved, on the staff and board, here.

In Lane County, Lookout will be the partner of OJP. What does that mean to our readers? We’ll have first call on publishing OJP pieces we think are telling and useful to local readers, and we will consider partnering with OJP staff on projects. While we’ll approach this step by step, we’re excited about the timing of these two ventures launching simultaneously.

HOLIDAY THANKS

As we wish you all a good holiday respite, we want to include special greetings to those who have most made our launch possible. These are individuals, families and local foundations who have contributed $5,000 or more to help create Lookout Eugene-Springfield. And as a reminder, it looks like we will end this year just $175,000 short of matching the Tykeson Family Foundation $1 million challenge grant. We’ve still got a couple of months to do that, but additional support is appreciated. Tax-deductible donations of $5,000 or more can be made by contacting us directly or The Lenfest Institute, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, by writing Charles Jun at Lenfest: charles@lenfestinstitute.org).