September 30, 2026
“A free press is the guardian of a free society”
The long pieces. They take as long as they take and they run when they are done.
September 20, 2026 · Nixie Worthington
A reader wrote to say this paper's coverage of the city manager never once mentioned homeless people. He was right. So we went and read the record — and found a city that knows what everything costs except the one thing it built behind the police station, a coordination failure documented in its own assessment, and a letter whose central accusation does not survive its own calendar.
September 15, 2026 · Nixie Worthington
The chair gave every speaker one minute, the interim director gave the commission six reasons, and after two years, 933 comments and about ninety seconds of roll call the Lithia Park bike trails were dead, two to three. Then the commission voted four to one to send the author of the proposal off to find another hillside. What the record shows about the evening, including the man who came to talk about a statue.
September 13, 2026 · Alan Decault
In February the superintendent retired the word consolidation and replaced it with Transformation. Everything underneath it stayed the same, including the committee charter that still says school consolidation, school mergers, grade level reconfiguration. Ashland's schools have lost roughly a fifth of their children, and the district has been telling us so one building at a time.
September 9, 2026 · Nixie Worthington
The nicest word in American land politics is 'access,' and the outfit that built the nicest door in the business is closer than ever to its founding goal: the Roadless Rule is being rescinded, comments close September 21, and the BlueRibbon Coalition has a form that will file your outrage for you. Before you touch it, come meet the people holding the door — their documented corporate past, their untraceable present, and a portfolio whose only across-the-board beneficiaries do not ride.
September 6, 2026 · Derek DeForest
An archival discovery sheds light on the broader history of radical politics and repression in Southern Oregon. A newspaper columnist the city council once commended for her faithful service had, before she came to Ashland, been secretary to the most active fascist in Southern California. Reprinted by permission of the author from Oregon Humanities magazine.
August 30, 2026 · Nixie Worthington
Somewhere in America this month, a parks board approved a mile of mountain bike trail in eleven minutes and the local paper gave it a paragraph. In Ashland it is a war — and the war is an inventory of everything this town could do if it aimed half this effort at the problems actually eating it. Names named, jazz hands included.
August 23, 2026 · Nixie Worthington
George Kramer says the city manager has to go, and he has chased the case further than anyone else in town has been willing to. This paper spent two months with the full record — the hiring she stabilized, the wildfire work, the money, the process failures — and arrived where he did by a different road. The reasons matter more than the verdict, and the 180-day clause in her contract matters more than either.
