October 20, 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.
October 18, 2026 · Nixie Worthington
On October 5 a councilor asked Sabrina Cotta to repeat the values she'd drafted for the city's strategic plan. The next night the council voted six to nothing, without a word of discussion, to part ways with her. Her last day was Friday. Four and a half years from her side of the dais, a year's pay that's ridiculous and also in the contract, and what the town owes the next one.
October 11, 2026 · George Kramer
A historian's eight-part account of how Ashland became the town it is: the mill jobs that left, the Committee of Fifty, a zoning map that never changed, a view nobody wanted to spoil, the tax measures that starved city budgets, and a population that got older and richer while the rentals disappeared. It ends with a list of what to do about it.
October 4, 2026 · Nixie Worthington
The pump that circulates the water at Ashland's only public pool came out of the duck pond seven years ago, when the real one failed the day before opening. Staff clean the filter by hand through an eighteen-inch porthole, throw the backwash lever through a gap of just over a foot while the water pours onto the floor, and drive to Medford for bleach. Fixing it costs about four hundred thousand dollars, which nobody on the commission has seen broken down, and the decision lands on a commission that has not been elected yet.
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.
