As this New Year’s Eve edition of the Grants Pass Tribune reaches you today, the final hours of the year are ticking away, kitchens are filling with familiar smells, plans are coming together, and Southern Oregon is doing what it does best, settling in with neighbors, friends, family, and a hopeful glance toward tomorrow. Before the ball drops and the calendar turns, I wanted to pause for just a moment and say something that never gets old but never feels big enough either, “thank you!”
This past year has surpassed every expectation we ever dared to set. What began as a local paper built on curiosity, persistence, and a deep belief in community storytelling has grown faster and farther than we could have imagined. In the last year alone our DR Rating (Domain Ranking) climbed from 18 to 27, a milestone that may sound technical but represents something very real, trust, credibility, and reach. Even more astonishing is the steady increase in readership, averaging about 1.2 million additional readers every quarter. For a newspaper rooted in a town of roughly 40,000 people, that kind of growth is not just rare, it is extraordinary.
What makes this achievement even more meaningful is how it happened. We have never paid for advertising. There were no marketing campaigns, no boosted posts, no shortcuts. Every click, every share, every comment, every reader who told a friend or forwarded a story made this possible. This growth was entirely organic and powered by you. The readers, the contributors, the quiet supporters, the outspoken critics, the people who show up daily and the ones who drop in once a week, all of you are the reason this paper continues to grow.
As we step into 2026, we do so without a crystal ball but with a clear sense of purpose. Like many of you, we hope the political circus that has dominated so much oxygen begins to wind down. While accountability will always matter and public scrutiny will never disappear from our pages, our heart has always been rooted elsewhere. We want to tell the stories of local heroes who have never been recognized, the small businesses you drive past every day but have never truly met, the people quietly doing good work without a spotlight.
We are also opening the door even wider in the year ahead. In recent weeks you may have noticed more contributing writers sharing their voices, their perspectives, and their passions. We want more of that. If you have a story, an opinion, a personal experience, or even a critique of this paper or of me personally, send it in. We will publish it. We may clean up grammar and punctuation, but we will not silence a viewpoint simply because we disagree with it. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are not slogans here, they are commitments.
So, as tonight unfolds, whether you are celebrating loudly, quietly, or simply grateful to make it through another year, we wish you a safe and happy New Year. Thank you for trusting us, challenging us, supporting us, and growing with us. From the bottom of our hearts, here’s to 2026 and to the stories still waiting to be told.