- Source: Ashland Daily Tidings
The Ashland Daily Tidings was a daily newspaper serving the city of Ashland, Oregon, United States. It was owned and published by Edd Rountree from 1960 to 1985 when he retired and subsequently purchased by Medford-based Mail Tribune, which it continued to publish until announcing that paper would close on January 13, 2023.
The newspaper's old domain name was claimed by a company that posts articles from other sources, slightly changed by artificial intelligence. Lawyers have been unable to trace the origins of the new site.
History
Edd Ellsworth Rountree was the owner and publisher from 1960 to 1970. He was known statewide for his popular "Friday Fish Fry" column on politics and current events which appeared on front page with a caricature above noting his opinion. Rountree sold the paper to the Democrat-Herald Publishing Co, which published the Albany Democrat-Herald. Capital Cities purchased the company in 1980, which itself was acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 1995. Disney sold its Oregon newspapers to Lee Enterprises in 1997. Lee sold the Daily Tidings to the Dow Jones & Company in 2002. The paper were managed by Local Media Group, another subsidiary of the international company News Corp.
On September 4, 2013, News Corp announced that it would sell Local Media Group to Newcastle Investment Corp., an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group, for $87 million. The newspapers were to be operated by GateHouse Media, a newspaper group owned by Fortress. News Corp CEO and former Wall Street Journal editor Robert James Thomson indicated that the newspapers were "not strategically consistent with the emerging portfolio" of the company. GateHouse in turn filed prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 27, 2013, to restructure its debt obligations in order to accommodate the acquisition.
In 2017, the Tidings and the Mail Tribune were sold by GateHouse to Rosebud Media. On July 15, 2021, the owner of the Daily Tidings announced the paper would be replaced with an Ashland Edition of the Mail Tribune starting in August. Two years later the Tribune ceased on January 13, 2023. Soon after the Tidings' web domain was purchased by scammers who relaunched the website with articles written with Generative AI and sometimes featuring stolen bylines.
Awards
The Tidings was one of three daily newspapers to win the Charles Sprague Award of General Excellence from the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association (ONPA) in 1981. In 2006 the Daily Tidings was awarded the "General Excellence" prize by the ONPA. In 2015, it won five awards including a first place for best educational coverage, from the ONPA.
References
External links
2006 Better Newspaper Contest winners, ONPA