Let’s just say it plainly, because dancing around it helps no one.
We built the Grants Pass Tribune to bring balance back to local news. Not red. Not blue. Not agendas dressed up as headlines. Just information people can actually read, understand, and decide on for themselves. That was the goal from day one, and it still is.
And yes, there’s another newspaper in town. The Grants Pass Daily Courier. They’ve been here a long time. Over a hundred years. That matters. Whether you agree with them or not, whether you like their coverage or not, that kind of history is part of this town’s backbone.
Now let’s not pretend everything is friendly behind the scenes. It isn’t. There have been moments that were frustrating, moments that felt personal, and moments where it’s clear they don’t exactly root for us. That’s fine. That’s competition. That’s business. Anyone who’s ever built something from scratch knows exactly what that looks like.
But here’s the part people don’t expect me to say.
We don’t want them to go anywhere.
Read that again if you need to.
We don’t want them to disappear. We don’t want to be the only voice in this town. And we sure as hell don’t want the weight of all local news sitting on our shoulders alone. That’s not balance. That’s a monopoly on information, and that’s not good for anybody.
Competition is not the enemy. It’s the pressure that keeps both sides honest. It forces improvement. It forces accountability. It forces all of us to actually earn your attention instead of assuming we deserve it.
The truth is, what we’ve built here at the Tribune is different. It’s faster. It’s easier to read. It’s more direct. And clearly, it’s connecting. Millions of you clicked on our stories last year. Thousands keep coming back every single day. That doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen because people are bored. It happens because something about what we’re doing is working.
But success doesn’t mean we should root for someone else to fail.
That mindset is small. It’s short-term. And it’s not how you build something that lasts.
The Daily Courier represents something we don’t and honestly can’t replicate overnight, and that’s deep-rooted history in this community. Generations have grown up reading it. Families have relied on it. That kind of legacy matters, even if you think it needs to evolve.
And let’s be honest about something else. Without them, there probably wouldn’t be us. Not in the way we exist today. Competition didn’t just challenge us, it sharpened us. It forced us to define who we are and how we do things differently. That’s a good thing.
So, here’s where I stand, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it.
Support both.
Support the Tribune if you believe in what we’re building. Support the Courier if you believe in preserving a piece of this town’s history. But understand this, you don’t have to pick one and tear down the other. That’s not how a strong community works.
A strong community demands more than one voice. It demands options. It demands accountability from every direction. It demands balance.
Rumors will fly. Opinions will get loud. People will try to frame this as a fight that has to have a winner and a loser.
It doesn’t.
The real win is a town where multiple newsrooms are still standing, still reporting, still pushing each other, and still giving people the information they need to live their lives and understand what’s happening around them.
That’s the kind of town worth fighting for.
And that’s exactly what we intend to protect.