Founder of Washington County’s Gales Creek Journal reflects on 10 years of community coverage

When we talked with Chas Hundley in 2017, it was after he’d been running his first paper, the Gales Creek Journal for about 4 years and was about to take it — along with a second news site, The Banks Post — to print. To do that he had to leave his job in tech, and devote himself full time to local journalism. Now, 10 years and one global pandemic later, he’s still at it, largely on his own. But in that time he’s gone to weekly printing and launched the online Salmonberry Magazine, which focuses on the Tillamook State Forest area. Hundley joins us to share more about his journey and his hopes for these publications — and the communities they serve — in the next 10 years.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. When we talked with Chas Hundley in 2017, it was after he’d been running his first paper, the Gales Creek Journal, for about four years. He was about to take it, along with a second news site, the Banks Post, to print. To do that, he had to leave his job in tech and devote himself full time to local journalism in western Washington County. Now, 10 years and one global pandemic later, he is still at it, and still largely on his own. In fact, he’s even added another site ‒ the online Salmonberry Magazine, which focuses on the Tillamook State Forest area. Chas Hundley joins us now. Welcome back.

Chas Hundley: Thanks for having me back.

Miller: Could you remind us why you started this 10 years ago?

Hundley: Absolutely. I grew up in the Gales Creek community, and when I was a kid there was this sense of  tight knit community that started to deteriorate as I entered my adult years, and a lot of factors caused that, but one of the biggest ones was we lost our school. And that was kind of the first domino of a topple effect that took out all the other businesses. We lost this heart and soul of our community, and people weren’t finding ways to connect with each other. And so I came upon this idea of starting a digital news site that, at the time, the concept was a part-time ‒ no idea I would ever try to make it a career or make money. Just list events that are happening and put them up on social media and on our website. And that is kind of the genesis of the Gales Creek Journal.

Miller: Why have you kept doing it?

Hundley: It grew from there because people kept asking me to ask questions about what was happening in our community.

Miller: Like what?

Hundley: Well, it started with, we have a major highway ‒ Highway 6 ‒ going through Gales Creek, linking Portland to Tillamook. And every time there was a big crash, it was very noticeable and people would contact me because they knew I knew things and say, “Chas, what’s going on on highway 6?”. And I would go, “Well, I don’t know.” So I would contact the Oregon Department of Transportation and give him this long rambling spiel about, “oh, I don’t really work for a newspaper, but I’m trying to find out…” and they finally just cut me off and they’d say “we don’t care, just say who you’re with and we’ll give you the information you want.”

And so it’s questions like that that started but then the questions started to become more in depth. “Chas, what’s going on with this land use issue? Chas, what’s happening at the school district?” And so I started digging into this and kind of realized, oh, hey, I’m doing journalism.

Miller: What was the reaction when you went from online only to printing every now and then ‒ or it’s once a week, right?

Hundley: Yeah, we print every week. The reaction was really good and puzzled. A lot of people were wondering why I was…

Miller: Going the opposite direction to...

Hundley: Everyone else was folding or starting digital newsrooms or doing this and that. And then I’m like, I’m gonna put ink on paper. And at the time I actually had a business model where not only was I doing print, I was mailing it for free to every single household once a month. And so we doubled down, took an old school approach and said we’re going to do print journalism in western Washington County.

Miller: But why?

Hundley:  Because… Well, there’s some practicality to it. It’s gotten a little better since 2013 and 2017, but internet access has always been a struggle for rural communities, so some people didn’t have that reliable way to read our news online. And we also do have older folks who, they’re not going to touch a digital scrappy start-up. They want to pick up their newspaper, pick up a cup of coffee and read the news, and I can’t say that I blame them.

Miller: Is your business model still to mail out free copies to everybody?

Hundley: Not anymore. I very quickly found out that that is a great way to do a ton of journalism and lose a lot of money quickly, so now we’ve moved to subscriber-based only. People pay a fee to get it mailed through the United States Postal Service or they pay a fee to get it digitally delivered.

Miller: Let’s turn to some things you’ve covered recently. Over the summer, there was a wildfire near Banks. What was that time like for you?

Hundley: Yeah, that was an interesting one. It was uncomfortably close to city limits and it was close enough to homes it actually did damage a home. People were very worried about it because it was visible. It shut down Highway 26 and 47. And for me, it was this mad scramble. I think I published that day, on my own, about 20 or 25 updates ‒ each kind of their own 100 to 200-word story about what was happening. And so it was very frantic, but in moments like that, that really distills your vision, your focus, into one. This breaking news, this sense of urgency where I was the only person, I wouldn’t say on the ground. I didn’t drive there physically but I have contacts in the area. I was contacting people who own property right next to it and saying what’s going on and contacting local fire agencies and police services. And for me, that was a good reminder of why I’m doing this because what’s more important than a fire burning near your home and knowing if you need to leave or not, and being that source of information that people rely on?

Miller: Every month in the Bank’s Post, you publish a police log and a fire district log. Yesterday you did something different for the police log. You posted a recording of a verbal report given by sheriff’s deputy Frank Ward at a recent Banks City Council meeting. I want to play part of the audio, which we edited briefly just for clarity:

Frank Ward [recording]: There is a person here in town who we know has some mental health issues. And he… this person likes to text 911, “I’m going to kill myself. Nobody cares about me,” that kind of stuff. That’s kind of his baseline. And our mental health response team has been trying to work with him and the family, and trying to get them some resources, but he won’t engage, refuses to engage, at which point it is everybody else’s fault.

And so at one time, at one point during this mass of texting 911, “you know what, I’m just gonna go down the City Hall and break the window. I’m gonna throw a rock through the window.” A week or so went by, then I get a call, or a text message from another deputy, who was here with Jo Lynn at what, 10:30 at night, 11:00 o’clock at night, something like that, that hey, by the way, somebody broke City Hall’s window. So I said, I think I know who it is.

So I called him, came to work the next morning, called him just kind of on a whim, because I really didn’t have anything to prove it other than his text messages from a week or so ago. And so he answers, and I said, “Hey, Mr. So-and-So, why did you break the window?”  “Oh, you guys pissed me off.” I went, “Cool. Why don’t you meet me and I’ll give you a citation for criminal mischief.” So we met at Arbor Park, and he got a ticket and then he actually decided he wanted to engage in some services at that time. So I gave him a ride to the hospital where he can hopefully get some help.

Miller: Chas, why did you want to include that audio on your site?

Hundley: Well, two things. I believe innovation is super important for rural and small newspapers and including things like audio snippets, videos, interactive graphs, is something I don’t see a lot of small newspapers doing and I understand why ‒ it’s difficult, it’s hard to do. So any opportunity where I can do something just a little bit different and maybe change how we can view these things, that’s important.

And then for this specific column, usually we’re submitted this written form saying here’s the police log, and they didn’t do that because there were only a couple of incidents. So I was going through and transcribing this manually and I realized, I can also just include this, and our readers can hear directly this feel for how their police services are delivered to their elected leaders. Because that’s what this was, it was during a city council meeting, it was the deputy assigned to the city of Banks. And I thought it was important to hear this walk through of exactly how this came together. And I would be remiss to not mention for anybody who read it or listened to it, that the security cameras at the salon do indeed now work. The business owner confirmed. So any would-be thieves getting any ideas out there…

Miller: And I should say one of the parts we cut out just for time was the first interaction he mentioned, he gave the city council, which was a fentanyl overdose. And he says, “if there are people in this community who think it’s not here, you’re wrong. It is.”, meaning fentanyl is. What do you think that interaction says about life in Banks?

Hundley: There is this conception that big city problems don’t trickle down into Banks, I think. And people tend to view something they might hear about in the Oregonian or on OPB about this drug crisis that’s gripped our state and the nation, and they might not understand that, no, that really is happening in Banks. I’ve written about it. It’s often in the police log. I think we had one time where there were like six overdoses in one month, and Banks is a small town. It’s hovering around 2,000 people and the deputy was absolutely right. It is in our community.

Miller: If you don’t cover these stories in Gales Creek or Banks, or other communities that are even smaller, who is going to?

Hundley: No one.

Miller: Literally. Unless there’s a huge crime, say.

Hundley:  Sure. Yeah, if there’s a big crime or a fatal crash, we’ll get picked up by the local news stations. But our bread and butter is stuff that nobody else touches and it’s very small town stuff, sometimes. I’m about to publish a story about a Christmas party at our tiny little library that’s open once a week

Miller: Or the one-year anniversary of a restaurant, a diner that opened last year.

Hundley: Yeah. Just put that one out. That wasn’t in any other newspaper.

Miller: What’s the value of that, do you think?

Hundley: I think that there is, especially in this day and age where our public conversation can be a little fragmented, there’s something really valuable about just the rhythms of daily life in our community being written about in a responsible and ethical way and in a way that maybe shows you something you didn’t know about. There were a lot of people in that story you referenced about the restaurant, they had no idea that restaurant existed, let alone that it had been here for 12 months.

MIller: The words responsible and ethical. Those are also words that you used when you described part of your reasons for creating the Salmonberry Magazine, that you said, “nobody has attempted to comprehensively, ethically, and steadily cover the news surrounding our forest.” How do you deal with a “warts and all” approach to covering your communities, given that they’re small and that I imagine at this point everybody knows you, you know almost everybody and you’re just there. This is not just where you grew up but where you want to stay. How do you cover the area honestly when you are so embedded in a small area?

Hundley: It can be really tricky. A big thing that I do is disclosure, disclosure, disclosure. If I have some unavoidable conflict ‒ for example, my cousin is the president of the Gales Creek Cemetery Association. I have to write about the Gales Creek Cemetery Association. So I put, right up front, not at the end of the story. “Hey, by the way, I’m related to this person.” Our readers can decide if my writing about Sandy is going to be biased because we’re related by blood.

Another thing is just being really clear with people in their expectations. For example, I’m a one man show. I have to handle the advertising side of our business and the journalism side of our business, which means if I’m going up to a business and saying I need to write a story about something you did and they’re an advertiser, I have to understand that I might lose their business and I’m okay with that. Journalism comes first. I am blessed and cursed that I don’t make a lot of money doing this. So I’m not going to take a huge hit if somebody goes, I didn’t like that story you wrote, I’m gonna pull my subscription or advertising. That’s okay with me.

Miller: Earlier this week, we talked to a couple in Maupin who had just launched a newspaper of their own for the first time. They’ve never done anything like this ‒ sort of like you, you’d never done anything like what you’re doing now. What advice do you wish you had gotten when you started?

Hundley: Everything takes longer than you would expect, and learn to love systems and processes.

Miller: What do you mean by that?

Hundley: When I first started I had absolutely no experience, and I didn’t have these ideas for weekly publishing schedules that I would need, or how to contact somebody for a story, follow them throughout the life of the story, follow up with them after the story, schedule when I should follow up with the story a year later. Things like that, that you don’t really see when you’re talking about journalism, these minutia, these details, those are hugely important.

Miller: You started this because you saw a sense of community eroding and you wanted to create community. Do you think you’ve done that?

Hundley: To some degree, yeah. I feel like we took a step back with COVID, and that part of my role in the community that I see for myself is being an ethical newspaper, but also not shying away from the fact that we’re gonna write about the small stuff, the little stuff, in a way that’s friendly and courteous and kind to everyone around us. But when it comes to this community togetherness concept that we have... I’ll back up, I’ll give you an example...

Miller: In 30 seconds, please.Sorry.

Hundley: In 30 seconds... we had, for the first time since COVID, a candidate forum, and that was huge. We got 80 people in a room and they heard directly from candidates for school board in Banks, and we hadn’t done that since pre-pandemic and people loved it and said we want more of this. And that’s one thing I see myself doing.

Miller: Chas, it was great talking with you again. Thanks very much. Here’s to another 10 years.

Hundley: Thank you for having me.

Miller: Chas Hundley, editor and sole staffer for the Gales Creek Journal and the Banks Post and the Salmonberry Magazine.

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