With the impending phoenix-like rebirth of The Tribune in Medford – aptly, since Phoenix is a community to the south – I would like to offer some reflections on the recent demise of the Mail Tribune.

Personal, because I worked at the Mail Tribune from 1989 until 2000, mostly as its political and county government reporter. The newspaper (no website then) dropped “Medford” from its nameplate a few months after I was hired.

The first takeaway: Jackson County’s population grew by 35,000 during the 1990s, equal to the growth in Hillsboro during the same decade. But that 25% rate solidified the Rogue Valley, including next-door Josephine County, as it came into its own as Oregon’s fourth-largest metro area and third-largest television market, albeit small compared with Portland and Eugene. The upshot was that while statewide candidates might make a single campaign stop in Roseburg, where I had worked the previous decade, all of them would appear regularly in Southern Oregon.

One of the series I was most proud of while I was there was a 1994 project on population growth, which launched a long effort by valley residents and planners to find ways to accommodate change without transforming the valley into San Jose or Southern California.

Yet the feelings of many in the valley could be summed up in a statement by a former legislator: The road from Portland to Medford was longer than the road from Medford to Portland. Translation: While people from the valley and other parts of Oregon were accustomed to going to the state’s largest city to do business, the reverse was not true.

The second takeaway: Aside from the legislators themselves, I was a link between the people of the valley and the state government in Salem. Though the Mail Tribune began the practice a couple of years before I was hired by Bob Hunter, as its political reporter I was based in Salem – gavel to gavel – for Oregon’s every-other-year legislative session. Like the legislators I covered, I moved to Salem for a session, and then six or seven months later, I moved back to the Rogue Valley until the start of the next session. I moved 12 times in my 11-year tenure at the Mail Tribune.

This was before the era of the internet and electronic communications that made legislative proceedings far more accessible outside Salem – and before voters approved annual sessions in 2010. Aside from a handful of regular visitors, I was the one person watching our legislators in Salem – and reporting not just about them, but how people in the valley were affected by what they did or did not do.

Then-Sen. Lenn Hannon of Ashland, who holds the modern-day record for Oregon Senate tenure at 29 years, told me he had long advocated for Mail Tribune coverage of the Legislature. He said he did so not because it would result in more news coverage of him and the other area legislators – though of course it did – “but the people of the Rogue Valley deserve to read more about what goes on in Salem than a couple of sentences in a wire service story.”

Alas, Hannon – both a Democrat and Republican – is gone. (He left the Senate in 2004 after an appointment by Gov. Ted Kulongoski, and died in 2010.) So is that linkage via news coverage, because the Mail Tribune discontinued it after I left for another job in 2000. The Mail Tribune did hire someone for part-time coverage of the Legislature, and sent my successors occasionally to Salem, for a few years afterward.

The third takeaway: Like many Oregon news organizations in that era, the Mail Tribune saw itself as a guardian of the values of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and free expression. I was hired long after it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism in 1934 — and long after Mabel Ruhl (wife of Robert Ruhl, who was in charge when the paper’s expose of political corruption won it the most prestigious prize in journalism) sold the Mail Tribune in 1973 to Ottaway, the community newspaper division of Dow Jones. But the lawyer who negotiated that sale, Stephen Ryder, remained as publisher and then an Ottaway vice president while I was there.

The Ruhl name remains on a lectureship at the University of Oregon School of Journalism. Allen Hall on the campus is named in honor of Eric Allen, and his son – also Eric – became the Mail Tribune’s editor until his death in 1986. Though I was hired after Allen’s death, I had met him years earlier at a journalism conference that the Mail Tribune sponsored with Southern Oregon University.

In Allen’s era and beyond, the Mail Tribune was not shy about advocating for what editors believed was right – or reporting that went beyond the superficial.

The Mail Tribune as I knew it is gone. But from my vantage point, what it stood for – comprehensive and deep news coverage, courageous editorial stands, and a voice for the public – is still very much relevant today. May it indeed rise from the ashes like the mythical phoenix — but for real.