The headquarters of the defunct Mail Tribune building in Medford had barely gone dark when The Daily Courier in Grants Pass announced its intention to help fill the void. And it turns out that the paper's bosses started their inroads in Jackson County months ago, when the Mail Tribune stopped printing a physical paper and went web-only.
Since the MT shut down, The Daily Courier has since hired two reporters and a photographer from the MT staff, and continues to plow ahead. How can any newspaper afford to be so aggressive in so small a market, in so terrible a time for the journalism business?
We put those and other questions to Daily Courier publisher Travis Moore and editor Scott Stoddard. They lay out the economic and journalistic realities.