About La Grande Observer

La Grande Observer

The La Grande Observer is a newspaper in La Grande, Oregon, founded on 20 October 1896 as the Eastern Oregon Observer by George H. Currey, who moved the press of the Baker City Blade to La Grande to start it. A Populist weekly and the fifth paper established in La Grande, it outlived all of its predecessors and every early rival, passing through daily and multi-weekly forms, the Currey brothers' proprietorship, a succession of twentieth-century owners, a reduction from five days to three days a week in 2012, and purchase by EO Media Group in June 2019 after its previous owner, Western Communications, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Printing then moved to the East Oregonian press in Pendleton. It continues as the paper of La Grande and Union County in northeastern Oregon.

The Observer's history, documented through the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program at the University of Oregon, is unusually complete for a small-city paper: its founding editor, its family proprietorship, its daily editions at the turn of the century and its chain of owners from 1910 to the present are all on record. That record makes it a model case of the American small-city newspaper's evolution across three centuries, from party weekly to independent daily to regional group property.

George H. Currey and the Founding of 1896

George H. Currey founded the Eastern Oregon Observer on 20 October 1896, physically moving the printing plant of the Baker City Blade from Baker City to La Grande to do it. In the hand-press era, a newspaper's plant was its capital, and Currey's relocation of the Blade's press was the founding act in material form: La Grande, a railroad town in the Grande Ronde Valley, gained a paper because an editor hauled his equipment there. The new weekly was Populist in politics, aligned with the People's Party insurgency then at its national height in the election year of 1896, and it entered a crowded local field as the fifth paper established in La Grande.

Being fifth might have predicted a short life; instead, the Observer outlived all of its predecessors. Small-city papers of the era died of undercapitalization, political defeat and editor mobility, but Currey's paper combined a party's energy with a county seat's legal and commercial base, and it survived the Populist movement itself, dropping the Eastern Oregon from its ambitions as it settled into the permanent role of La Grande's paper. The founding editor's brother joined him the following year, converting a personal venture into a family firm.

The Currey Brothers and the Daily Editions

Frederick B. Currey joined his brother in 1897, and the Currey Brothers moved quickly into daily publication, issuing the Daily Morning Observer in 1897 and 1898 and the La Grande Morning Observer in 1901, then establishing the La Grande Evening Observer from 1904. The sequence shows a small-city publisher testing the daily market at the moment La Grande's railroad economy could support it, retreating and returning until the evening daily took durable form. The Observer name, carried across weekly, morning and evening editions, was the constant brand through these experiments.

The Currey era established the paper's template: locally owned, editorially engaged and rooted in Union County's agricultural and railroad economy. When the brothers' proprietorship ended, the paper passed not to closure but to a new owner, beginning the chain of succession that carried it through the twentieth century. Each transfer in that chain is documented, which allows the Observer's ownership history to be told as a single continuous narrative from 1896 forward.

Owners Across the Twentieth Century

The recorded succession after the Curreys runs through the classic phases of American newspaper ownership. Bruce Dennis acquired the paper in 1910, in the era of the independent small-city proprietor. Frank B. Appleby followed in 1925, and Peter R. Finlay in 1930, carrying it into the Depression. In 1941 Frank Schiro and Fred Weybret took over, and under them the paper's subscribers grew from under 1,700 to over 3,600 by 1949, a postwar expansion that reflects both the Grande Ronde Valley's growth and the paper's consolidation of its market. In 1959 Robert W. Chandler and J. M. McClelland Jr. became its owners, beginning a longer modern proprietorship.

That pattern, a new local or regional owner roughly each generation, each inheriting the same name, plant and county franchise, was how hundreds of American small-city papers survived the century. The Observer's version is distinguished by the completeness of its documentation in state newspaper records, which preserve not only the owners' names but the subscription growth of the 1940s, allowing the paper's mid-century consolidation to be measured rather than merely asserted. By the time chain ownership arrived in the form of Western Communications, the Observer had been La Grande's paper for well over a century in prospect and practice.

The Grande Ronde Valley's Paper

La Grande is the seat of Union County and the principal city of the Grande Ronde Valley, a farming and timber region of northeastern Oregon set between mountain ranges and served historically by the railroad and, later, by Eastern Oregon University. The Observer's coverage has always been the valley's public record: county and city government, courts, schools, the university, agriculture and timber, and the personal record of births, marriages and deaths through which a rural community knows itself. A paper founded in 1896 in such a valley accumulates a unique asset, the only continuous account of the place's modern history, written week by week and day by day by its own journalists.

The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program's preservation of the Observer's history reflects that value. State programmes digitize papers that document their communities most completely, and the Observer's documented run, from the Eastern Oregon Observer of 1896 through its daily forms, makes the social and economic history of northeastern Oregon recoverable in primary form, from Populist politics to the timber economy's decline and the university's growth.

From Five Days to Three in 2012

In 2012 the Observer reduced its publication frequency from five days a week to three, a change that marked its adaptation to the economics that transformed American small-city papers in the digital era. A five-day paper in a city of La Grande's size depended on local retail advertising and subscriptions that the internet progressively eroded. Cutting to three days concentrated the paper's resources on fuller editions and on its digital presence, preserving daily reporting capacity in reduced print form rather than closing, the choice many comparable papers were forced to make in the same years.

The 2012 reduction is best understood as the modern counterpart of the Currey brothers' frequency experiments of 1897 to 1904. Then, the paper expanded from weekly toward daily as its market grew; in 2012 it contracted from five days to three as its market's print economics shrank. In both cases the Observer adjusted its form to its valley's capacity while keeping its name, staff and franchise intact, which is the underlying continuity of its history. The paper that emerged remained La Grande's principal news organization, publishing in print three days a week and online continuously.

Western Communications, Bankruptcy and EO Media

The paper's later chain era ended in 2019. Western Communications, the Bend-based company that owned the Observer among its Oregon papers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, placing its titles' futures in doubt. In June 2019 EO Media Group, the Oregon newspaper company built around the East Oregonian of Pendleton and The Bulletin's regional neighbours in the state's community press, bought the La Grande Observer. The purchase kept the paper in Oregon ownership within a group specialized in exactly its kind of market, the small cities and counties of the state's east and coast.

Under EO Media, the Observer's printing moved to the East Oregonian's press in Pendleton, the regional consolidation of production that group ownership makes possible: the paper is edited and reported in La Grande, printed in Pendleton and distributed back to Union County. That arrangement, unremarkable in modern community publishing, would have been unimaginable to the Currey brothers, who moved a press to La Grande because a paper had to be printed where it was published. The technology changed; the franchise, La Grande's own paper since 1896, did not.

EO Media Group and Regional Oregon Journalism

EO Media Group's acquisition placed the Observer in a family-owned Oregon group whose papers share reporting, production and digital infrastructure across the state's non-metropolitan regions. For a paper of the Observer's size, group membership supplies the digital platform, advertising systems and printing plant that independent operation could no longer easily sustain, while local editors continue to produce the Union County coverage that is the paper's reason to exist. The Observer's post-2019 history is thus a chapter in Oregon's broader story of community papers surviving through regional consolidation under state ownership rather than national chains or closure.

The bankruptcy-to-purchase sequence of 2019 also illustrates the fragility the group model answers. A Chapter 11 filing by a distant owner can end a 123-year-old paper through no fault of its local staff or market. EO Media's purchase converted that risk into continuity, and the Observer continued publishing through the transition without losing its identity, the outcome its readers in the Grande Ronde Valley had reason to expect from a paper that had already outlived every rival since 1896.

The Observer's Archive and Historical Value

The paper's back run, documented and partly digitized through the University of Oregon's programmes, records northeastern Oregon from the Populist era forward: the valley's settlement and agricultural development, the railroad's role, the world wars' local impact, the timber economy, the growth of the teachers' college that became Eastern Oregon University, and the everyday record of Union County families. Genealogists and historians using the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program encounter the Observer as a principal source, its history summarized in the programme's records with a completeness that itself testifies to the paper's significance.

That archive includes the paper's own institutional memory, the Currey brothers' daily experiments, the 1940s subscription growth and the ownership succession, preserved as part of the state's newspaper documentation. Few small-city papers can have their whole biography verified from public records as the Observer's can, and that verifiability is a form of authority the paper carries into its digital present.

The La Grande Observer Today

Today the La Grande Observer continues to publish for La Grande and Union County under EO Media Group, in print on its three-day schedule and online through its website, printed at Pendleton and edited for the Grande Ronde Valley as it has been since 1896. It remains the direct descendant, in name, franchise and archive, of the Eastern Oregon Observer that George H. Currey founded on 20 October 1896 with a press hauled from Baker City.

A paper that began as the fifth title in a railroad town, carrying a third party's banner in an election year, has become the valley's permanent record through every change of owner, frequency and technology since. That is the Observer's distinction: not merely that it is old, but that its whole long adaptation, from Populist weekly to Currey brothers daily to bankrupt chain property to EO Media community paper, is documented, continuous and still in progress in La Grande.