HISTORY OF THE NEWSPAPERS

HISTORY OF THE NEWSPAPERS

The West Lane News, though it is the smaller of the two newspapers produced by Serif Publishing Company, is the older of the pair.

The West Lane paper was established in 1961 by Archie Root, a perpetually energetic booster of the town of Veneta, then an unincorporated community. Root and his wife, Esther, had no professional journalistic experience, but they worked steadily at improving and expanding the newspaper he had created. In 1972, the Roots retired and sold the newspaper to Duncan and Jane McDonald, recent Oregon transplants from Illinois.

Duncan McDonald, trained as a journalist, had worked on the Cleveland, Ohio, Plain Dealer. Jane McDonald was a hearing and speech specialist but became part of the newspaper operation, which initially operated from a production room in the couple’s new Veneta home.

In 1976, the University of Oregon hired Duncan as a journalism instructor. (Duncan would eventually become dean of the journalism school and then a vice president of the university. Jane would remain involved in speech therapy, first teaching at the university and then becoming executive director of the Eugene Hearing and Speech Center.)

As the career paths of the McDonalds changed, they sold the West Lane News in 1976 to Joe and Louise Cannon. Joe Cannon was a newspaperman with Kansas and Arizona roots. Louise was a teacher, but would play a part-time bookkeeping role in the newspaper venture.

In his first year of operation, Cannon created the Tri-County Shopper (now the News Shopper) a free distribution advertising flyer that blanketed the circulation area of the West Lane News. He also pushed the shopper 20 miles north into neighboring Junction City and Harrisburg, and began selling advertising there.

In 1977, Cannon established a Junction City-based newspaper, the Tri-County News, in head-to-head competition with the established Junction City Times. The Tri-County name emphasized the newspaper’s service to Junction City, Harrisburg and Monroe, a compact group of three towns, but each lying in a different county. Later, Cannon added coverage of Coburg to the Tri-County News mission.

The Junction City Times ceased publication in 1984. Joe Cannon, meanwhile, had bolstered the news and advertising strengths of his two publications. In 1980, he had constructed in Veneta a headquarters building for his company. Production for both papers was handled there, while a satellite news and advertising office served Junction City.

In the early 1980s, Cannon added to his stable the Benton Bulletin, the weekly newspaper in the community of Philomath. In 1994, the Cannons semi-retired to Port Townsend, Washington. The papers were managed by key employees, with periodic visits by Joe Cannon.

In 1997, Cannon sold the papers to Ed Hawley, a copy desk veteran of the Chicago Tribune. Within a year, Hawley closed the Benton Bulletin. Subsequently, he encountered both legal and financial difficulties, and Cannon regained control of the papers in mid-1999. He then sold them to Mike and Sandy Thoele of Junction City.

Mike Thoele was a former Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard editor and feature writer. Thirty years earlier, the Thoeles had moved to Junction City from Indiana when he accepted his first Register-Guard post as the daily paper’s full-time resident reporter in the community. The Thoeles had met as employees of the newspaper in Sandy’s Indiana hometown.

The Veneta headquarters building constructed by Joe Cannon had been heavily damaged by fire just before the Thoeles’ acquisition. Because Junction City had become clearly the larger of the two communities, the Thoeles used the transition to relocate the headquarters operation to Junction City, with Veneta becoming a satellite news, advertising and circulation office.

The expanded Junction City operation, including production facilities for both papers, was located initially in rented facilities. In 2003, the Thoeles acquired a historic 1910 house at the edge of the Junction City business district and remodeled it to serve as headquarters for the Tri-County News.

In 2008, the Thoeles sold the newspapers to Andrew Polin, former CEO of the St. Louis Jewish Light in St. Louis, Mo. His background includes extensive work on community newspapers in Arkansas and Florida, as well as a period of working as a freelance writer in Israel. Polin is a working publisher of the two newspapers and associated publications.