Our eleven newspapers provide accurate, fair and timely reporting about the people and issues impacting the communities we serve in the Pacific Northwest, reflecting the responsibility and spirit of a free press. Find more information about our publications below or learn more about our commercial print operations.
The Blue Mountain Eagle is a newspaper and website serving Grant County Oregon. The news outlet's main office is located in John Day, Oregon.
Capital Press is an independent newspaper published every Friday covering agriculture in the West and across the country. The news outlet's main office is located in Salem, Oregon.
The Chinook Observer is the news source for Pacific County, Wash., publishing a newspaper on Wednesdays and online news throughout the week at www.chinookobserver.com. Founded in 1900, the Observer serves a dozen scenic, historic and fascinating communities centered on Lewis and Clark National Park and Washington state's favorite seashore, the Long Beach Peninsula. Winner of hundreds of journalism awards, the Observer strives to provide an ongoing biography of one of the newsiest places in America.
The Daily Astorian is committed to serve readers and customers on Oregon's north coast and southwest Washington. This five-day newspaper and its myriad print and digital products have won numerous journalism, design and advertising awards. As the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies, Astoria and its surrounding communities are lush and vibrant. The Daily Astorian echos that vitality, with a new press in 2011 and growing digital audiences.
The East Oregonian has been northeastern Oregon's largest regional newspaper since 1875, and has been continuously owned by the same family since 1908. The EO covers Umatilla and Morrow counties, and is published Tuesday through Saturday mornings, with updates on our website throughout the week. The EO's main office and printing operation are located in Pendleton, with a bureau in Hermiston.
The Hermiston Herald is a newspaper and website serving Hermiston, the largest city in Eastern Oregon.
The Oregon Coast Today is a free weekly publication that covers everything fun to do in Lincoln and Tillamook counties, from Manzanita in the north to Yachats in the south. Whether you're learning to dig for clams, hiking a coastal trail or taking in a show, be sure to rinse your feet after reading because nothing gets you closer to the beach.
The Wallowa County Chieftain is a website and weekly newspaper covering Northeast Oregon. The news outlet's main office is located in Enterprise, Oregon.
The Blue Mountain Eagle is Grant County's only newspaper published weekly as a subsidiary of the East Oregonian Publishing Co. which also includes the East Oregonian, The Daily Astorian, Capital Press, Chinook Observer, the Hermiston Herald, Oregon Coast Today and the Wallowa County Chieftain.
The present Blue Mountain Eagle is the result of a long line of mergers of early newspapers founded in the county. The original name, Blue Mountain Eagle, came into existence in 1889, when the late Orin L. Patterson of Canyon City bought the Long Creek Eagle and changed the name. He moved the plant to to Canyon City in 1900. In 1908, the Grant County News, published by P. F. Chandler, was merged with the Blue Mountain Eagle, and Patterson sold his interest in the publishing business to Chandler and Clint Haight, who acted as co-publishers. Chandlers' other partners during the 44 years he was engaged in the newspaper business were Robert Glen, C.J. McIntosh and his son, W. Glen Chandler.
P.F. Chandler's son, W. Glen Chandler, entered the business at an early age. He served as editor-publisher for the Grant County Journal, a newspaper founded in Prairie City in 1899, from 1925 until 1937. Chandler bought the John Day Valley Ranger from Arthur R. Jones in May of 1937.
At that time, the John Day Valley Ranger was a continuation of the Long Creek Ranger, established in 1900. The Ranger office was moved to John Day in March of 1930, and the name of the paper was changed to theEast Oregon Ranger. The paper became knows as the John Day Valley Ranger in March of 1931, and was published in offices in John Day. A fire on April 19, 1937 in Canyon City that was disastrous and wiped out the town, destroyed the office of the Blue Mountain Eagle. Plans were then outlined to have the Eagle published in the Ranger plant in John Day. W. Glen Chandler and Clinton Haight were at the helm of the Eagle. Chandler and Haight severed their partnership in October of 1941.
Following the death of P.F. Chandler in April of 1942, the son, W. Glen, took over management of the Blue Mountain Eagle and served as editor and publisher of both the Eagle and the John Day Valley Ranger, merging the two newspapers in April of 1944. This marked the beginning of the printing firm, the Eagle Ranger Publishing Company. At that time, Chandler and Chester A. Ashton formed a partnership.
Chandler retired from the publishing business in Grant County in June 1947 after being engaged in the business for nearly 23 years. He sold his interest to Ashton and moved to the Willamette Valley. Ashton and his wife, Vera published the Blue Mountain Eagle, a consolidation of the Grant County News, the Prairie City Journal and the John Day Valley Ranger until June 1948, when they sold to Elmo and Dorothy Smith. Miss Viola M. Puntney served as publisher of the Blue Mountain Eagle starting in 1956, when the Smith's established their home in the Willamette Valley.
In 1968 Donna and John Moreau purchased the Blue Mountain Eagle from the Smith family. In 1979 the Blue Mountain Eagle merged into the East Oregonian Publishing Company. In 1997 they moved the Eagle building from Highway 26 to the current address of 195 N. Canyon Blvd., in John Day. The Blue Mountain Eagle went online in 2000, www.bluemountaineagle.com.
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Capital Press is a weekly newspaper and website based in Salem, Ore., that cover agriculture across the West.
Founded in 1928 as the Hollywood Press — named for a pastoral section of North Salem — its publisher, A.M. Church, focused on state government. Four years later, the paper became Capital Press and called itself a statewide weekly paper.
In 1946, Church sold the paper to Henry Hanzen, a Portland lawyer, and Dewey Rand Sr., a native of Baker County, Ore., and Portland insurance agent who had been active in Democratic politics in the 1930s.
In that post-World War II era, Rand and Hanzen refocused Capital Press on covering the diverse agriculture of the Willamette Valley and built a thriving classified advertising business.
Rand eventually bought out Hanzen and officially retired in 1985 at age 86.
Rand’s son, Dewey Rand Jr., joined Capital Press in 1955 and worked in all phases of the paper — advertising, circulation, reporting and editorial writing. He eventually succeeded his father as publisher. With his longtime general manager, Bill Anderson, Dewey Rand Jr. stretched Capital Press coverage into Washington state and, in the late 1980s, into Idaho.
Over time Capital Press has became the pre-eminent agricultural newspaper in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California.
In 1991, Dewey Rand Jr. sold the paper to the Forrester and Aldrich families, owners of the East Oregonian Publishing Co., now called the EO Media Group. Mike Forrester became editor of the Capital Press in 1990, adding publisher to his title a few years later.
Forrester retired in 2003 and Elaine Shein was publisher and editor until 2008 when she was succeeded by Mike O'Brien as publisher and Joe Beach as editor.
Capital Press is located at 1400 Broadway St. NE in Salem,OR where it has been since 1963.
Today, Capital Press goes to about 32,000 print and online subscribers in every state.
In addition to www.capitalpress.com, Capital Press also operates www.onlyag.com, www.farmseller.com and has Facebook and Twitter feeds.
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The Chinook Observer was started late in 1900 by two investors named Hibbert and Gaither. Gaither’s involvement was short-lived, but Hibbert lived in the Chinook area and was publisher for many years.
Within weeks after it was founded, the Observer was joined by Charles Angus "Jack" Payne, who wrote many of the paper’s colorful early reports about pioneer life on the Columbia River. He arrived on the Peninsula in a very unusual way, as the survivor of a famous shipwreck.
The Strathblane, a three-masted British ship, wrecked four miles south of Ocean Park on Nov. 3, 1891, with a loss of seven lives, including her captain. The wreck of the Strathblane led directly to construction of North Head Lighthouse, which celebrated its centennial in 1998. An original architectural drawing of the lighthouse now is the front-page logo of the Chinook Observer.
Payne and Hibbert started publishing the Observer in a "funny little shed" in Chinook. Later, the two men built a two-story building, the only one of its kind in the area. That building still stands and is used as an art gallery.
A townsman said "The printing presses and office were located on the ground floor and his living quarters were above. [Payne’s] bedroom was a small ship’s stateroom, complete to built-in bunk, a port hole and ship’s clock."
In about 1923, Hibbert sold the newspaper to John and Margaret Durkee. They operated the paper through most of the Depression years. With the outlawing of fishtraps in 1933, Chinook went into a sharp decline. Bill Clancey of Chinook bought the paper, and in 1937 James O’Neil became co-owner. O’Neil moved the paper to Long Beach in 1938, but retained the original name because of its historic connotations.
Much of the newspaper’s printing equipment from its earliest days was housed at Fort Columbia State Park for many years, but was recently moved to a new exhibit at Ilwaco Heritage Museum. The Observer now is printed at The Daily Astorian each Tuesday night.
O’Neil’s son Wayne and his wife Frances took over the paper in August 1963 and operated it until July 1, 1984, when it was sold to Craig and Geri Dennis, the son and daughter-in-law of the owner of Dennis Company hardware stores in Raymond and Long Beach.
On Feb. 16, 1988, the East Oregonian Publishing Co. bought the paper from the Dennis family. In 1991, Matt Winters was named Observer editor and he remains so.
The Observer has a circulation of about 6,700, making it one of Washington’s larger weekly newspapers. Its staff has won more than 50 statewide awards for excellence in the past five years, adding to the scores of other prizes it won in past years.
The Chinook Observer celebrated its 100th anniversary last year with a historical series that continues and which will be re-published in book form. Beginning its 101st year of publication on Dec. 12, 2001, it remains committed to thoroughly and thoughtfully covering the lives and times in its fascinating corner of Washington state.
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On the morning of Tuesday, July 1, 1873, a crowd milled at the corner of 10th and Commercial streets until Tri-Weekly Astorian Publisher DeWitt Clinton Ireland threw open his office doors and started selling papers.
The book "The Astorian" by Roger Tetlow reports that the city's first newspaper since 1866 sold out by noon that day – and Ireland said he wished he had printed more than 500 copies.
Business? You could say it was booming.
That four-page issue of the Tri-Weekly Astorian established a tradition that celebrates its 129th "birthday" July 1.
The news of the day was presented differently in 1873. Headlines, when they were used, were in small type and confined to one column, as were the stories. Small news briefs, sometimes no more than a sentence long, were front-page news and had to share space with classified advertising.
These excerpts are taken from the pages of the first issue
With no education beyond age 12, Ireland learned the newspaper trade as an apprentice in South Bend, Ind. At 19, he founded his first paper in Mishawaka, Ind.
Three years after he began the Tri-Weekly Astorian, Ireland grew ambitious. The Tri-Weekly Astorian evolved into The Morning Astorian May 1, 1876, Astoria's first daily newspaper.
The daily glory lasted just over a month. Faced with low profits, Ireland was forced to cut publication to weekly status June 19, 1876.
To raise financial stability, the company branched out, printing salmon canning labels. In another year – on June 2, 1877 – the paper went daily again.
In 1881, Ireland sold the paper to John F. Halloran and Pitman W. Parker. The paper would change hands several times until 1930, when it merged with the Astoria Evening Budget, a separate paper founded in 1893 by Oscar W. Dunbar and John Gratke.
In 125 years, the Astorian – be it Morning, Evening, Budget, Tri-Weekly or Daily – has changed. News used to come to the remote city of Astoria by horse and buggy; now, high-speed computers and satellite links transmit news from around the world. Gone forever are the days of hand-engraved and hand-set type and pictures; our journalists write and edit local stories, compose headlines and design pages on desktop computers.
However, some things never change. The names and places in the articles and advertisements from that July 1, 1873 issue are familiar. Gearhart, Van Dusen, and Flavel can be found in the Astorian today.
For eight decades, The Daily Astorian has been under the leadership of the Aldrich-Forrester family. In 1968, Michael Forrester became editor; three years later he was named editor-publisher. In 1973, when the Astorian-Budget Publishing Company merged with the East Oregonian Publishing Company, Michael Forrester became editor of the East Oregonian in Pendleton and his father, J.W. Forrester, who had been at Pendleton, was appointed editor of The Daily Astorian.
In 1988, J.W. Forrester retired and his son, Steve Forrester assumed the post.
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The East Oregonian was first published as a weekly in 1875 by M.P. Bull. Seven years later, C.S. "Sam" Jackson purchased the EO and by 1883 it had become a semiweekly. A building for the paper was constructed at the corner of South Main and Emigrant in 1887. In 1888, the paper became a daily except Sunday.
Edwin B. Aldrich became editor and a stockholder in 1908. In 1913, the stock was divided into four equal shares owned by C.S. Jackson, Aldrich, Fred Lampkin, and Lee Drake. In 1934, Fred Lampkin died, and his stock passed to Dorothy Engle of San Francisco.
Amy Aldrich Bedford started work at the EO in 1949 as the manager of the commercial printing plant. When it was sold she became the promotions/public relations manager.
Aldrich was editor until his death in 1951. Upon Aldrich's death, J.W. "Bud" Forrester became editor and his wife Eleanor, the business manager. Forrester, his wife Eleanor, and Amy Aldrich Bedford purchased the stock owned by Lee Drake. During the same year the East Oregonian opened its bureau office in Hermiston. Eleanor Forrester and Amy Bedford are the daughters of E.B. Aldrich.
In 1956, the paper relocated to a new building at 211 S.E. Byers Ave. and in 1960 the East Oregonian purchased a Goss Suburban press, becoming the first daily paper west of St. Louis to use an offset web press. In 1964, the cold type method of typesetting was installed. The following year Dorothy Engle died, with her stock passing to Amy Bedford and Eleanor Forrester.
Mike Forrester, son of Bud and Eleanor Forrester, became editor in 1973 when J.W. Forrester moved to become the editor of The Daily Astorian. In 1990, Mike became publisher of the Capital Press. The East Oregonian started having non family members as editors. The publisher position was created in 1997 and Mark Garber was tabbed the first. In the summer of 2001, Floyd Jernigan was named the second publisher.
Jacqueline Brown, daughter of Amy Bedford, came to work as the human resources manager of the Company in 1988. Her daughter, Kathryn Brown, serves on the company board of directors and writes a health column for the papers. Steve Forrester, brother of Mike Forrester, joined the company in 1987 as the editor of The Daily Astorian. He is now the publisher of that five-day a week paper.
In 1994 the presidency of the EO Pub. Co. passed from J.W. Forrester to Mike Forrester. The Sunday editon of the East Oregonian, started in 2000, circulating throughout northeast Oregon.
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Effective April 30, 2008, Western Communications Inc., previous owner of The Hermiston Herald, sold the newspaper to the East Oregonian Publishing Co., of Salem. EOPubCo owns seven other newspapers including the East Oregonian and the Capital Press, a four-state agricultural weekly newspaper published in Salem.
"The Herald has a long, celebrated history of serving Hermiston," said Steve Forrester, president and chief executive officer of East Oregonian Publishing Co. "Our newspaper group is pleased and proud to bring it into our publishing family."
The company has promoted Jeanne Hoffman, longtime EO advertising representative and Hermiston office manager, to general manager of The Herald. Dean Brickey, the new editor, has been the East Oregonian's assistant editor and bureau chief in Hermiston and previously edited newspapers in Baker City, Redmond and other Oregon communities. Both are graduates of Leadership Hermiston and active in community groups.
John S. Perry, EO Media Group's chief operating officer, said the East Oregonian remains the daily newspaper for Pendleton, Hermiston and other northeastern Oregon communities. The Herald, Perry said, will continue providing Hermiston with more distinctively local news, information and advertising.
"Jeanne and Dean are veteran newspaper executives who have a deep appreciation for Hermiston and its residents," Perry said.
Kathryn B. Brown, associate publisher of the East Oregonian, will be corporate liaison for The Herald, the Blue Mountain Eagle of John Day and the Wallowa County Chieftain of Enterprise, two other EOPubCo newspapers. The East Oregonian's press crew prints The Herald and the other two publications.
"I am looking forward to working with Jeanne and Dean as they put their own unique mark on coverage of the Hermiston community," Brown said. "They are already heavily invested in Hermiston. We think it is important that some of our most talented individuals are involved in this new venture."
The Hermiston Herald was founded in 1906 by Horace Greeley Newport and William Skinner. Western Communications purchased the paper in 1992 from Jerry Reed who had a history with the newspaper dating back to 1969. He assumed full ownership of the Herald in 1974.
When the Herald was celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2006, Reed commented "you'll never find a good newspaper in a bad town or a bad newspaper in a good town and Hermiston is a great town."
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The Oregon Coast TODAY is published in Otis, just east of Lincoln City, and is distributed throughout Lincoln and Tillamook counties, as well as at the Spirit Mountain Lodge in Grand Ronde and points east.
The free weekly newspaper provides coast visitors and residents with the most current arts, entertainment and activities news available, plus regular features about the flora and fauna of the coast, book reviews, humor and more.
Contributors include author Matt Love of Newport, humorist H. Paul Bruncke and others.
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The Wallowa County Chieftain has a long, proud history of chronicling the daily life of the northeast corner of Oregon, week in and week out, year after year. In more than 125 years, the Chieftain has published every week, never missing an issue, while at least 25 other county publications have come and gone. Today it stands as the county’s only newspaper and Wallowa County’s oldest business by far.
The paper dates back to May 15, 1884, when the first issue was published in Joseph under editor H.S. Heckethorn. The idea of a local newspaper was conceived at a meeting called by Joseph storeowner F.D. McCully. He spearheaded a bill three years later separating Wallowa County from Union County.
The newspaper spent its first nine years in Joseph, before moving operations in 1893 to Enterprise, which remains its home base today. The Chieftain’s first home in Enterprise was a building on Main Street that is now a bookstore. The paper moved into a custom-built structure made of native stone in 1916, where it remained until its transfer to its present modern quarters at 209 N. 1st St.
The Chieftain saw 11 editor-publishers come and go between 1884 and 1911, when a newsman from Kansas City, George Cheney, brought a new era of stability. He assumed the helm and held it for 30 years, through World War I and the Great Depression.
In 1941, a Springfield, Ill., lawyer named Gwen Coffin purchased the paper, starting a family tradition that spanned the next 60 years. Coffin himself was editor-publisher through 1971, when he sold the Chieftain to his son-in-law, Don Swart, editor-publisher.
Coffin – who once took the very controversial stand of criticizing the government for its treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII – was inducted into the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association Hall of Fame in 1993. Coffin continued to write editorials and columns for the Chieftain until the week of his death in 1994.
Stewardship passed to Coffin’s grandson, Richard Swart, who started working for the Chieftain shoveling snow from the sidewalk at age 7. He ended up buying the paper from his father in 1998, becoming the third generation of his family at the head of the Chieftain.
The East Oregonian Publishing Co., with its own long background as a family business, purchased the Chieftain in March 2000.
The Chieftain, like other surviving publications over a century old, has gone through a dizzying array of technological changes through the decades. In 1912, for example, it went from hand composing to Linotype and in 1977 from letterpress to offset printing.
In 1987 writing news stories on typewriter gave way to computer word processing programs. Manual page paste-up gave way to computer pagination, and printing in-house to transferring computer pages for printing at the East Oregonian plant in Pendleton, allowing the use of full color in every issue.
The Chieftain was the second newspaper in Oregon with a presence on the Internet, starting with a bulletin board service in 1995 and launching its first website with the www.wallowa.com address in 1996.
The Chieftain has thrived with the ongoing support of its parent company, EO Publishing Company, serving its on-line customers with frequent news updates as part of a multimedia identity, while continuing to produce a quality weekly newspaper. The Chieftain even joined the social media world last year with a Facebook page that has a growing following of more than 1,400.
Though it is firmly grounded in the modern age, the Chieftain draws from historical roots in its continuing community news coverage for all of Wallowa County.
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The other newspapers and websites of the EO Media Group – The Daily Astorian, Chinook Observer, East Oregonian, The Hermiston Herald, Blue Mountain Eagle, Wallowa County Chieftain, Oregon Coast Today, Capital Press, OnlyAG, Discover Our Coast, Northwest Opinions – are committed to protecting your privacy online. Not only does protecting your personal information help you, but also it increases consumer confidence and hopefully your participation online.
The purpose of this policy is to let you know what information we gather about you when you visit our sites, how we use that information, whether we disclose it to anyone and the choices you have about those functions.
Our sites may have links to other websites. We have no control over the content or privacy practices of any of these sites or those of our business partners or advertisers.
Our sites use cookies to verify subscribers and to help ensure single voting on our polls. Cookies help our websites recognize you as a previous visitor and thus save and remember any preferences that may have been set while you were visiting. A cookie cannot get any other data from your hard drive, pass on a computer virus, or capture your e-mail address. We track the number of unique visitors to our sites and which articles or sections receive the most visitors, but not by any personally identifiable information. If you choose to modify your browser preferences to reject all cookies, you will have difficulty navigating our sites.
You may be asked to voluntarily supply some personal information, including your name and contact information. If you choose to supply this information via the Internet know that we will never sell or share your personal information. We use the information you supply us to perform statistical analysis and marketing breakdowns. Some of our websites collect information as part of a reader advisory group. We may use that information to target questions of a specific nature to interested participants. If you elect to receive any of our electronic newsletters via e-mail or the e-mail breaking news service, we may use that address to invite you to participate in a readers group or some similar newspaper function.
EO Media Group newspaper websites and blogs will perform statistical analyses of user behavior in order to measure interest in different portions of our website and to inform advertisers about how many consumers have clicked on their ads. We only disclose information to third parties in aggregate form. Personal information about you is not collected and will not be provided.
Newspapers and our websites of the EO Media Group may occasionally use the e-mail addresses collected to send you promotional e-mail to its viewers about services offered by the papers. We may contact you regarding account status, changes to the subscriber agreement, and to confirm your login information.
You may use the Feedback form on our sites to provide us with any changes in your information at any time. Or, if you prefer, direct questions regarding our privacy policy, the accuracy of your personal information or the use of the information we collect by e-mail to Digital Media Director Crindalyn Lyster at online@dailyastorian.com. You may reach us by telephone at (503) 325-3211 or by mail at EO Media Group, PO Box 2048, Salem, OR 97308.
The right to download and store or output the materials in our sites is granted for the user's personal use only, and materials may not be reproduced in any edited form. Any other reproduction, transmission, performance, display or editing of these materials by any means mechanical or electronic without the express written permission of the EO Media Group is strictly prohibited. Users wishing to obtain permission to reprint or reproduce any materials appearing on these sites may contact the Digital Media Director.
This privacy policy is effective as of December 1, 2012. We reserve the right to change this policy at any time and will post those changes here as soon as they take effect.
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