Our League was fortunate to have as their December speaker Quinton Smith, the founder of the online Yachats News, which he began as a local public service project after a 40-year career as a reporter and editor for United Press International and three Oregon newspapers. Smith grew up in The Dalles and graduated from OSU, where he began studying engineering, but switched to journalism after the first year. He was editor of the school paper, and during his senior year began working as a correspondent for the Portland Oregonian. After graduation, he went to UPI, covering regional news from their Portland office.
He earned a Masters from U of O, then worked as reporter and assistant city editor in Albany. There were 78 reporters with the paper then; now there are four—and they cover Corvallis too. At 34, he became editor of a three-times-weekly Gresham newspaper with a staff of 13. He loved being his own boss, and felt that they accomplished many good things in his four years there. However, when he got a call from the Oregonian, offering him “half the work at twice the pay,” he couldn't turn it down. He called that time the Golden Years of journalism, with strong financial support, able to cover the entire state, with correspondents in every county. At one time his team ran up a $32,000 phone bill for reporting on the Thurston school shooting. His publisher showed him the bill, and he was shocked. “Do I have to pay this back?” “No, keep covering the news.”
He worked for The Oregonian from 1984 to 2008, where his team won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. At that time, there were two floors and 425 people in the newsroom. The Oregonian has only 78 today. Between the 2008 recession and the migration of advertisers and readers to the internet, traditional newspapers were gutted. The Oregonian offered him a generous buyout, and he was retired at 59. He (in his own words) just “goofed around for 10 years.” He and his wife built on property the family owned in Yachats and moved there. He felt that he wanted to do community service of some kind. Yachats is very community-oriented, very involved, and he wondered, how could he contribute?
There were plenty of volunteers for city council, planning commission and so on—and yet no one seemed to know what was happening. He has always worked in local news, and advocated for it, noting that it is more difficult in rural areas such as this. So he decided to do what he had been doing for years, report on local news. He used about $5000 to set up a website and opened it in January 2019, calling it Yachats News. He would attend a city council meeting and write a story, a fire district meeting and write a story, a planning commission meeting and write a story. His only focus was Yachats—not Waldport, not Newport, not Lincoln County.
That first month, the website was getting 750 page views, which didn’t bother him; he liked doing it, and it wasn’t costing him anything after the initial investment. But after the first year, the site had 15,000 views. He bumped into a woman in Yachats who was a former Connecticut news editor; she said she'd like to help him out. He said, “Sure.” An old friend from Portland called him and said he had a second home near Yachats, and he wondered if there was anything he could help with, so he came on board. Then a former advertising director from the Oregonian called. She suggested helping him with some advertising, and he said, “Fine, but I want nothing to do with it. You take half the revenue and just tell me what’s going on.” That was five years ago, and they are still together.
When the Covid pandemic hit, he felt the rest of the media in the county was covering it very poorly. This was a tourist economy, but all the motels, businesses, and restaurants were shut down. The Yachats News ramped up its county-wide coverage. By the end of 2020 their page views had jumped to 50,000, and the growth has continued, with about 100,000 page views per month at the end of 2021. It is now about 200,000, and he expects 2,000,000 by the end of this year.
They are increasing their coverage both in the county and across the state, developing news
partnerships with Oregon Coast Today and other media, including OPB, KLCC, and the Capitol
Chronicle in Salem. This has proved to be important; 25% of the current page views are for the Oregon section. This means that local people have free access to news from outside of the local area.
They have become a 5013C nonprofit, which allows them to fundraise better. They have many small donors and have received grants from various organizations. This allowed Smith to hire, at a living wage and with good benefits, a reporter. They now have a budget of about $90,000—Smith still works for free.
In January, they will change their name to the Lincoln County Chronicle, published by Yachats News, to reflect their county-wide coverage and broaden their appeal. They are fundraising to hire a second reporter, to be based in Newport. That reporter will cover county government, the school district, housing and homelessness issues, the Bayfront, Hatfield Marine Science Center, and so forth.
The focus is still local; even as it has expanded to cover a larger area, there is still so much going on that is just not being covered. He has no intention of moving into national news, and does not plan to offer opinion. One goal is to replace himself as a reporter, so he can focus on managing the site and setting the agenda.
Why does he continue to do this? He feels it is part of civic engagement, his responsibility to his community.
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