Lookout is going to have a sister

Lookout Santa Cruz will soon have a sister.

I’ve hinted at our expansion plans over the past few months, and now they have gotten public notice. At a date still to be decided, Lookout Eugene-Springfield will launch in Oregon’s second-largest metro area. As both the Oregonian newspaper and the public media trade site Current wrote last week, Lookout Eugene-Springfield aims to become the primary news source for the citizens of the area. 

Eugene is the seat of Lane County, a fairly vast geography stretching from “the coast” to the Cascades mountains. We’ll concentrate our coverage on Eugene, home of the University of Oregon, and in neighboring Springfield, once one of many Oregon mill towns now reinventing itself. We will cover the county as a whole, with help from local news publishers. We’ll be aided by Oregon Public Broadcasting, with 60 journalists statewide, which will be our strategic partner.

Like Santa Cruz County, the area has seen the result of chain ownership eviscerating a once-well-established daily. The longtime family owners of the Eugene Register-Guard sold their paper to a chain in 2018, which then merged with another chain a year later. The result: a small newsroom no longer relied upon by the community. 

We’ll field a team somewhat larger than our current Lookout Santa Cruz contingent, given the population to be served is about 400,000, compared with Santa Cruz County’s 267,000. That means that overall Lookout Local, our parent company, will employ almost 40 people, a nice little hometown economic development story.

Lookout Eugene-Springfield, too, will provide a full-service news and information set of products, with the site, newsletters, email and text alerts, and public forums.

We’ve started recruiting for the team – with one applicant already saying he wanted to be “the Wallace Baine of Eugene.”

This needs to be said: You all helped us get to this – first – point of expansion. It’s been your membership, your readership, your advertising and your supportive comments. From the dark days of the pandemic into which we launched in November 2020 to now seems a lot longer than 3½ years. Many of you joined us at the beginning, and others along the way. You have proved that given the opportunity to support a new organization working its tail off to provide factual, trustworthy reporting, community members will respond. We believe that is true in communities across the country — if they are given the chance to support it. And, as I’ve now spoken with hundreds of Oregonians, they enthusiastically will.

It is that hope, now proved, that spurs us to expand, first to Eugene-Springfield and then to other locations over time. 

In addition, let’s be clear that it is our people, everyone on the Lookout Santa Cruz team that has propelled us to this point. We have an excellent mission-centric model, one that executes at business speed on community connection and revenue, and which supports many community goals. But it is the people who make that model real every day, and who allow us to offer similar commitment and quality to another community.

We are already talking about how to make the most of a larger company, in the journalism we do and in the business. West Coast cities share many challenges in common, including homelessness, affordability, across-the-board equity issues and the opioid epidemic. (On the lighter side, there might also be a pinot noir contest in the offing, given our county’s strength and Oregon’s in the varietal. I’ve asked Laurie Love, who keeps you all informed about local wines and winemakers, to give that some thought.)

We’ll keep you informed as we move to launch. Here are the FAQs on the initiative. 

Please let me know any questions or comments on the venture.