Periodically you print letters lambasting Eugene’s daily newspaper, The Register-Guard. It is true that the RG is sadly diminished since its glory days: before Craigslist took away most of its classified advertising revenue, before a great many former newspaper readers started getting their information, and misinformation, from internet sources, before the daily newspaper industry nationally began its ongoing decline. It’s not just Eugene.

I read the RG online, daily. I read the Weekly in print, weekly. The RG’s education reporter, Jordyn Brown, provides, among other things, excellent coverage of news that I used to follow in person, the Eugene School District 4J Board of Directors’ meetings, as well as many other education stories. I don’t follow other reporters as closely, but I know that I would miss much information about the city, the county and the state if I just stuck with the Weekly, which is more a news magazine than a newspaper.

The RG supplements its Eugene reporting with news from other statewide sources, including the Salem Statesman Journal and Oregon Public Broadcasting. I would miss this if it disappeared. I would miss the Weekly, also, but for different reasons: for its more idiosyncratic coverage, for the dark corners it occasionally illuminates, for the startling words that sometimes emerge from its interviewees. I would certainly miss more the day-after-day focus that the RG, however diminished, still offers.

Larry Koenigsberg

Eugene

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