Ken Doctor prepares to launch his second ‘Lookout’

Presenter: Pulitzer Prize-winner Ken Doctor appeared at City Club Feb. 28 as he prepares to launch his digital newspaper, Lookout Eugene-Springfield.

Ken Doctor (Lookout Eugene-Springfield): I think this moment in American life is a special one to recognize. We are in a time of incredible suppression of the public’s right to know and of greed which has eviscerated many of the nation’s newspapers, more than half of them.

[00:00:29] I was an analyst in the newspaper trade for 10 years, and that was a far easier job I would say than starting a new news outlet. But I did that for 10 years. I was able to learn a lot from people like Mark Thompson at the New York Times. And also I had to cover the loss of local journalism. What’s happened at the Register-Guard, as it was sold to GateHouse and then absorbed by Gannett, is typical in now more than half of the country.

[00:00:56] And so we arrive at this point, a major change in national politics. We see greed in terms of newspaper companies that are essentially owned by hedge funds that are milking the last money they can out of older subscribers. That’s essentially their business model. And we see many more attempts at suppression and cancellation. It is a fraught time.

[00:01:20] I’ll give you two examples. Just in the last month in Santa Cruz, and we have the largest newsroom in the county in Santa Cruz, ten people. It’s not enough but it is the largest, and we do a hell of a job. We had on Inauguration Day, which was also ironically MLK Day, as you’ll remember, a self-immolation in front of City Hall.

[00:01:43] This kind of happened, and very few people saw it, a couple eyewitnesses. The city suppressed the information. The police were outraged that we were asking about it.

[00:01:54] There were portions of the Black community, since this was a Black Lives Matter activist who had done this in protest. And there are elements of the Black community that said, as they knew we were trying to report the story widely, ‘If you publish this, we will boycott you forever. We will make your lives holy hell.’ We did that story, we got that story out.

[00:02:20] We were the only ones that had that story at the beginning. It was a very important story of the time.

[00:02:27] We followed that up two weeks later with a story about a man named Adolfo Gonzalez, who was the first person apparently picked up by ICE off the streets in Santa Cruz with the new crackdown that is happening. He lived there 20 years, walked out of his house at 7:30 in the morning. Two ICE agents came up, threw him in the back of a white van, and then airlifted him to Tijuana. That story too, nobody would talk about. We dug that story out.

[00:02:55] Unfortunately, there are going to be so many stories like this. We’ve now started a series in Santa Cruz, ‘The Trump Presidency and Local Impacts,’ talking about the crackdown, talking about budget problems, which are going to be profound for all of us on a local level in government and education.

[00:03:13] So against that backdrop, that’s why I have decided, at an age where too many people tell me I should be retired, to build more Lookouts. We intend five through the end of 2026, and this is the second. We don’t have any specific plans beyond this. This is a major undertaking. We’re totally focused on it.

[00:03:35] We are at an office at 771 Willamette. We will soon invite you all in. We’ve had three groups in this week. It’s been wonderful. It’s a meeting place for both the public and it’s an office/newsroom.

[00:03:49] And when Stephanie Bulger, the president of LCC, walked in this week and we had a meeting with her, and she said, ‘I can’t believe it. We expected three or four people in a little hovel, and here is an actual newsroom.’

[00:04:02] This is what these communities need. So, it’ll be 15 people in the newsroom and we will cover what a traditional daily newspaper covers, topically. That includes, of course, government, education, environment, public health, arts, entertainment, food, business, you name it.

[00:04:22] The way I describe what we’re doing is: We are a community newspaper, hopefully a good one, that happens to be digital. I tried to come up with another name for it, that’s what we are.

[00:04:33] And by being digital, saves a huge amount of money, which you all will benefit from as readers. The average newspaper used to spend 12.5% of its money on paying journalists. I know that from my analyst work. We spend 75% of our money on people, most of them, the majority of them, journalists. This is the value of digital journalism, and how we can use digital disruption in favor of community journalism. 

[00:05:06] What you will see when we launch is a through-the-day product, no more than daily. In Santa Cruz, we have seven newsletters a week, morning and afternoon every day, Sunday, a couple of food ones, food, well, which Vanessa is doing. Vanessa comes to us from Eugene Magazine. Food will be the number one, no matter how well Ben, who will cover county government, does, food will be number one. But it brings everybody in. That’s just the way it is. It brings everybody in, and that is really important.

[00:05:36] So you’ll see that breadth of coverage, you will see neighborhood newsletters, we have harnessed technology including our new friend, artificial intelligence, to create nine specific neighborhood newsletters for people around Lane County. Those will be out there. We have an app that will be ready at launch and make it really easy to access our content.

[00:06:02] The questions on business model have come up a lot and as I’ve talked to people over time. It is a simple one and it’s probably 250 years old. Publishing, news publishing, has always been supported by advertisers and readers in different percentages, depending on the time and the economies of the time. The penny press of 120 years ago, that was a penny. The newspapers I worked at with Knight Ridder Newspapers for 21 years, they depended largely on advertising. Our mix is about half advertising. We call it ‘marketing partnership.’ Morgana heads that up.  

[00:06:36] And then membership by readers, essentially subscription, but it’s a closer relationship. And so that’s what you will see. It is a site that does not provide all content for free, and we need to do that to pay good salaries to good journalists to bring you the work, but we do provide a lot of free content:

[00:06:58] All of our election content, which will be voluminous; disaster content, and there’s too many disasters happening; stories I talked about at the top, about the immigration crackdown and the protests, we make that kind of stuff free; and we are starting to do a lot of Spanish-language content, again, using the best technology of the day, and we are making that content free.

[00:07:23] So I know we’re going to have some questions and answers, but I just want to give you a little preview of what we’ll be up to very soon.

[00:07:28] Presenter: The first question came from Bob Keefer.

[00:07:31] Bob Keefer: The name of your outfit is Lookout Local and you emphasized the fact that you’re a local organization and yet you’re a corporation that’s registered in Delaware and based in California. Aren’t you just another chain like Gannett?

[00:07:48] Ken Doctor: ‘No,’ is the quick answer.

[00:07:50] Bob Keefer: You just announced that you’re expanding and applying for work—

[00:07:53] Ken Doctor: Sure, I’m happy to answer your question. Lookout Local is the name of the company. It’s a public service, public benefit company. It is registered in Delaware. It is incorporated in Delaware, registered in California and the state of Oregon, and our whole model is that the journalism is local and will be run by a local team. That’s the start of it. We have 20 people here.

[00:08:18] We’re using a model where we can use the technology and the advertising and membership learnings that we’ve had so that we can make this work here, but that it is run locally and that’s the model for Lookout overall.

[00:08:33] Bob Keefer: Good luck.

[00:08:34] Ken Doctor: Thank you.

[00:08:35] Jane (City Club, member): Hi, I’m Jane. Ken, I’m wondering, I have the feeling that you would have told us if you were going to tell us, but I’m going to ask you anyway: Do you have a prediction or a guess or can you tell us how much subscription is going to cost?

[00:08:49] Ken Doctor: It will probably be under $200 for a year and under $20 per month. .

[00:08:56] Jane Elliott (City Club, member): Thank you.

[00:08:56] Ken Doctor: Yes, to be coming very soon 

[00:09:00] Thomas Hiura (City Club, president-elect): I’m Thomas Hiura. I’m a city club member since 2019. I have a simple question. It’s kind of about the death of truth, very cheerful. We’re seeing this administration pull a bunch of objective data down from websites. I just also think in general we’ve lived in a landscape now for a little while where it’s so easy for false information to travel at the same speed or even faster than reputable information that has to go through sort of veracity confirmation. So how does that, what’s this landscape like for you to do your jobs?

[00:09:31] Presenter: For Lookout Eugene-Springfield, Ken Doctor:

[00:09:34] Ken Doctor: For us being digital is really, really the core of this, of the ability to, we don’t produce one product, we produce a wide set of content and then use every means we can to get that to different audiences. And so it’s very different than what a traditional daily newspaper did.

[00:09:51] We have a website, we have an app, we have the newsletters, we do a lot of forums, we do email alerts. And importantly, to your question, the issue of misinformation and disinformation is a profound one, which has only gotten really clearly worse as tech leaders have taken a knee to the president in the last two, three months here.  

[00:10:13] The strategy of ours is, we can’t take on each mistruth, you know, they’re infinite, right? What we can do is flood the zone with real news, factually reported by trustworthy reporters, which, and I can say this in Santa Cruz, has pushed to the edge more of the misinformation and disinformation. And then we use Instagram as well to reach younger readers, so those are among the solutions to this problem.

[00:10:40] Aria Lynn-Skov (SEHS): Hi, my name is Aria. I’m the editor of the South Eugene High School newspaper. And one thing I’ve noticed is a lot of my peers have less understanding of how to engage with traditional media, and also less understanding of how to approach what often feels like overwhelming news and I guess just stuff happening. So my question is, how with your platforms, would you want to interact with and engage those younger audiences?

[00:11:05] Presenter: Ken Doctor:

[00:11:06] Ken Doctor: So one of the things that we do that’s been an important part of Lookout from just about the beginning, I think six months in, is a program we call ‘Lookout In the Classroom.’ So it is clear that many of us in the room know the term ‘civics’ that we used to hear a long time ago. Now the modern term is ‘media literacy,’ basically the same thing.  

[00:11:30] We provide access to one-half of the students in public high schools in Santa Cruz County. And Amanda here, is our community and student engagement manager. And she is engaged in talks with local school districts to do the same here, and we’re getting a fair amount of enthusiasm.

[00:11:48] The idea is they need to know about their local communities, they need to know the local news, and we need to make it easy for teachers to have the kind of curriculum materials, quizzes, study plans, that kind of thing. So that’s something that’s really important to us, short-term and long-term.

[00:12:04] Christian Wihtol: Hi, I’m Christian Wihtol. I’m a local financial journalist. Ken, this is a question for Ken. I am wondering is Lookout going to disclose in detail its finances each year? And let me just continue, because you’ve raised a tremendous amount of money locally and a lot of people are curious about how your model works financially: your operating income, expenses, how much profit you’re going to be making, those kind of things, what people are being paid, all of those things. Are you going to be financially transparent or is it going to be confidential?

[00:12:41] Ken Doctor: So I write columns, often as I have, to readers describing what we have done. We do not disclose individual salaries of people. I’ve written nationally and locally about where we’re at financially, how our business model works, the percentage of our revenue that comes from various things, but we’re not going to disclose specific figures because it is competitive.

[00:13:05] Andrew Kalloch (City Club, president): Andrew Kalloch. Just this week the Washington Post‘s owner changed the editorial policy of that paper and it once again led at least some cohort of subscribers to end their subscription. And I wonder what you think about that and what advice you would give to citizens about how to support journalism, when to decide to pull the plug, and how to make those difficult decisions.  

[00:13:26] Ken Doctor: My advice to all of us is: Don’t be too quick to pull plugs. You’re not pulling a plug on Jeff Bezos. He’s sending rockets off into space with his celebrity friends. It doesn’t really make a difference to him on canceling that. What difference it makes is, how many journalists the Washington Post are going to have.

[00:13:45] And they still have, and a number of people resigned, they have, I think, 350, 450, I can’t remember the current number, really good journalists who are trying to keep this federal government accountable. And to the extent that that business goes south—further south at this point—more of them will lose their jobs at a critical time. And so I think the whole society could stand to kind of drop its shoulders a little and cancel less and take a little bigger picture view of what we need going forward.   

[00:14:20] Presenter: Ken Doctor shared a question that he gets a lot.

[00:14:23] Ken Doctor: ‘So when is it actually going to happen?’ Which is a very reasonable question, and I appreciate everybody’s patience. We are going to make an announcement of both launch date and top editors next week.   

[00:14:34] Presenter: Follow the historic launch of a new daily newspaper, Lookout Eugene-Springfield, at the website, LookoutEugene-Springfield.com.