When I called up Bert Etling, old-fashioned style using the phone, the first thing I said was that I was one of him. “I’m a real person,” I insisted. I think he believed me? Etling’s an editor who has suddenly found himself dueling with robots in a small-town news war of the future.
Etling is the editor of Ashland News, in the town of 21,000 in southern Oregon famed for hosting the annual Shakespeare festival. His site is a nonprofit with two reporters that sprang up after the regular newspaper, the Ashland Daily Tidings, folded three years ago. Etling had been the editor there, too.
Small-town news has been his career. When the Daily Tidings stopped printing for the first time since 1876, and eventually shuttered its website, too, there was a palpable feeling of “sadness and loss,” he says. He had set an old Google alert for any mention in the online world of the Daily Tidings.
It went silent. His email folder of notifications was like a memory book to a 145-year-old town institution. But sometime last year, it started pinging again.
Etling was getting new notifications, lots of them, that the defunct Daily Tidings was alive and kicking, sending out fresh stories again. The site’s masthead showed eight reporters — a ton for tiny Ashland. Etling knew one of them, so he called him to ask what was going on.
“He was utterly baffled,” Etling says. “He said ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not writing for them.
The Daily Tidings is dead.�.
