The second location of Lookout Local launches in Eugene, Oregon

Eugene, Oregon — Lookout Eugene-Springfield was getting a fresh coat of paint. The new newsroom is the second location of the digital-only, Pulitzer-winning local news startup Lookout Local and, when I stopped by two weeks after its launch, the downtown open-plan office was in the midst of a vivid makeover in teal and tangerine.

Only one month after launching, Lookout Eugene-Springfield boasts the second largest local newsroom in the state, $175,000 in booked advertising, and more than 900 paid members, said Lookout Local founder (and longtime Nieman Lab contributor) Ken Doctor. And that’s without a paywall. Lookout Eugene-Springfield is free for its first 90 days, sponsored by founding marketing partners.

Eugene is best known as the home of the University of Oregon — one of those four founding partners — and as Tracktown USA. (I was there to run the Eugene Marathon, which shares an iconic finish line with events like the U.S. Olympic Trials and Track and Field Championships on Hayward Field.) The city, the second largest in Oregon, has not been a news desert. The Gannett-owned Register-Guard has retained several local reporters (even if the daily newspaper is “a shadow” of its former self) and Eugene Weekly and a number of student-run publications contribute coverage as well.

Before his career as a media analyst and before he was a newspaper executive and editor, Doctor lived and worked as an alt-weekly publisher in Eugene for a decade ending in 1982. (Doctor, now 75 years old, called Lookout his “sixth or seventh career” in journalism.) He described Eugene as “very civic-oriented” and said it’s similar to the inaugural Lookout Local location in some ways: “Like Santa Cruz and so much of the West Coast,” Eugene is facing issues of homelessness, affordability, fentanyl, and mental health, and a lack of community conversations or solutions.

Doctor made roughly two dozen trips to Eugene in the lead-up to launch. He came away from all that face-to-face time believing that Gannett’s scrapping of its local opinion pages in 2020 marked a turning point in the community.

“In Eugene, they had the best independent paper in the state pulled out from under them — and relatively recently, so they knew what was missing,” Doctor said. (The Register-Guard was a family-owned newspaper with 240 employees when the newspaper chain now known as Gannett purchased it in 2018. The Baker family supported Lookout Eugene with $50,000 and furniture, Doctor noted with satisfaction.)

”[Community members] wanted a lively opinion forum of op-eds and letters to the editor,” Doctor said. “They wanted basic, trustworthy news, and they also wanted a forum to be able to discuss those issues in a way that made sense to them.”

Lookout Eugene launched with a larger newsroom than Lookout Santa Cruz and a new emphasis on founding memberships. Though memberships start at $17/month or $144/year, roughly half of new annual members are joining as founding members paying $250/year, Doctor said.

As Doctor originally envisioned, Lookout Eugene is operating not as a supplement to the local daily newspaper or as an investigative news site, but as a newsroom that expects to become the news source of record.

In a Monday morning editorial meeting last month, executive editor Dann Miller presided over the team as they pulled together a new batch of the “quick, reliable local news” Lookout has promised readers.

Correspondent Sarah Lorge Butler planned to write about a local man who died after finishing the half marathon. Politics and policy correspondent Ben Botkin was working on a story about a fire service fee. (Ann Marie Swan, editor of community voices and opinion, piped up to say she had a strong guest column to run on the subject.) Vanessa Salvia, Lookout Eugene’s food and drink correspondent, filed stories on local food gifts and local restaurants for Mother’s Day. A calm and encouraging Miller asked a few questions and urged them to “spin their stories forward” before ending the meeting.

In an interview afterward, Miller said the newsroom can set itself apart from other coverage in Eugene by asking itself who it’s writing each and every story for — making sure education coverage for parents, for example, quotes parents with kids in local schools, not just “a bunch of administrators.”

Miller acknowledged that Lookout Eugene has less traffic-driven goals than Gannett-owned newspapers. The different priorities will allow Lookout to publish fewer “how to watch” pieces and focus on community reporting. But he was generous when describing the existing local news scene in Eugene. He was news director for the Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis when the Daily Memphian launched, and the upstart’s original marketing left an impression on him.

“The experience I had on the other side was kind of miserable,” Miller said. “I want to make sure that what we’re putting out there is about having great journalism in Eugene. It would be disingenuous to be like, ‘We want great journalism in Eugene…but only if it’s from us.’”

Doctor plans to launch three new Lookout locations by the end of 2026. He says launching is cheaper and easier each time he does it. (He has praised the tech stack Newspack in the past, and did again.) “There are hundreds of places that need new local news outlets,” Doctor acknowledged. So how will he decide where to launch next?

“There’s not really an algorithm for it. You want a community that has a sense of itself, but also sees a way to — and sees a need to — solve community problems,” Doctor said. “That’s ideal for us, both in the journalism we do and [in] our events that bring people together. We want to give the sense that maybe we can actually solve some problems if we talk rationally to each other.”

Lookout Local benefits from the Knight Growth Challenge Fund that has set aside $5.4 million for a small group of “proven” local news outlets expanding into new markets. The coaches for the program — from Blue Engine Collaborative — worked with Doctor on pricing, among other business-side decisions, and said they were excited by the burgeoning network’s potential.

Blue Engine director of partnerships David Grant specifically heralded the mix of reader-generated revenue and corporate sponsorships Lookout Eugene was able to launch with.

“It truly is the model,” agreed Blue Engine director of program experience Lynne Brennen.

Brennen and Grant said some common mistakes for new newsrooms expanding to additional locations include failing to clearly define their market, failing to think big enough, and overlooking corporate sponsorships and advertising opportunities.

“[Lookout] has realized that [pursuing partnerships and sponsorships] is a really good use of their time and effort — almost as much as it is to get a large foundation or a major donor on board,” Grant said. While the local news industry has made long strides in appreciating the value of grants and reader-generated revenue, sponsorships get overlooked by too many new newsrooms, Grant said. “People have an emotional-slash-moral hangup around it for some reason.”

“I think we have decided, for some reason, that philanthropy or major donors are more blessed in terms of the tensions they introduce than sponsors,” he added. “In fact, they are all just different tensions and you just have to manage them.”

Doctor said he’s still a media analyst at heart. (He is offering advising work through the newly launched Lookout Growth.) He says he’s often asked to describe the business model for local news and always says the same thing. “It’s the same model that has worked for the past 200 years” — that’s advertising and subscriptions — “just in new ways.”