The First Draft of History | The Columbian Newspaper - 📍 Vancouver, WA

Local, independent journalism is struggling. (And that’s not news at all…) But here in SW Washington, the history of our community can't be separated from the history of our local newspaper. Owned and operated by people who actually live here. We're deep-diving into the history of how the newspaper came to be, how the Campbell family became its stewards in 1921, and how generation after generation of brothers keep figuring out how to run the paper together and still like each other.

🎉 Pictures and more

🗺️ Columbian.com

🎧 Other episodes you might like:
The Story of Us: Clark County Then & Now | Clark County Historical Museum
The Stories Beneath Our Streets | Two Rivers Heritage Museum

⭐️ This episode is sponsored by Johnson Bixby.

⭐️  Get your tickets to Chamber Music Northwest's summer festival! Use code IITPV for $10 off.

Transcript

Adriana: 0:34

Did you know that our local newspaper, The Columbian, has been owned and operated by the same family for four generations? And that "operating" part is really important because they are one of the only newspapers left where the family who owns it is actually living in the community where the paper is being made and running the day-to-day operations. They're actually in the building, editing the newspaper, connecting with the community, selling advertising, hiring folks, and doing all the business of the business. It's strangely uncommon now to have a newspaper in a downtown that's actually being printed downtown and reporting on the news of the day, holding politicians accountable, making a record of history. It's pretty unique now, which is a bummer, you know? The Columbian has a very strong mission to be as unbiased as possible, so they're trying to be not a Republican paper, not a Democrat paper, not a left paper, a right paper, but just a paper that's reporting on the facts as well as they can document them on a day-to-day basis. And the Campbell family has been at the helm of that since 1921. So I wanted to know more about the history of the Campbell family and how the newspaper came to be, how it came to be in their family, and how these generations after generations of brothers keep figuring out how to run the paper together and still like each other. I also think it's really important to shine a light on independent journalism, on unbiased, good, boots-on-the-ground reporting. So today we're gonna hear from Will Campbell, who is the editing side of the brothers duo. His brother Ben runs the business operations side. And Will is also the history keeper for the family now. He's writing a book on his great-grandfather Herbert, who was the first Campbell to own The Columbian, and he's just great at the archival work, the research, the details, which I guess is no surprise given that he's a journalist. I feel like there's so much more to mine here in the story of The Columbian as Southwest Washington's major newspaper, but today we're going to focus on the history side so we can get a bit of background about the mission behind The Columbian newspaper and their position in our community. Let's go check it out. Welcome to I'm Into This Place, your deep dive into the local arts, culture, and heritage of Clark County. From fabulous new restaurants to quirky art installations to the historical sites you never even knew to look for, we're inviting you along. Whether you're a Clark County connoisseur or just starting to get to know her, get ready to fall head over heels for this place we call home. I'm your host Adriana Baer, and I'm into this place. Let's go. Will, thank you for inviting me to join you at the newspaper today. We're tucked in a little room in the back of the newsroom. I'm so happy to be here.

Will: 3:37

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Adriana: 3:38

So today, we're gonna talk about The Columbian, and I really wanna focus on the history, because The Columbian is so special in its history, especially in our community. Going on 136 years.

Will: 3:52

Yeah.

Adriana: 3:53

And for the last 105 of those years, it's been run and owned and operated by your family the Campbells. One of the things that I just think I have to name right away is that that's unique, not just regionally, but also nationally. And it's not just that you are a family who happens to own a newspaper in Southwest Washington, right? You guys could be like some dudes who happen, you know, who like live in LA, and happen to own a newspaper, and who cares?

Will: 4:22

Which does happen, yes. Yeah.

Adriana: 4:24

But you are from here. You live here. So did your dad, so did your grandfather, and your great-grandfather, who bought the paper in 1921. And that is so important, I think, to name, because this is really a paper of and by the community. You're caretaking, you're uplifting, you're supporting, and you're holding accountable the people in your own community.

Will: 4:53

The vast majority of newsrooms are owned by people that do not live in that community, and a lot of the newsrooms in the, in the country are owned by, you know, big kinda hedge fund corporations 'cause there's been so much consolidation in our industry. It's been really tough for owners of newspapers within the past 20 or 30 years to be able to deal with the pressures of the industry, and a lot of the younger generations have not been interested in that because of the, the challenges. And so I, you know, I have my brother involved with this whole operation, which makes it kinda special, too. I've always been a little bit counterculture in a way, but now newspapers are, for my generation, kind of counterculture. And so I'm very interested in the challenge of bringing the newspaper into the next century of digital and keeping newspaper and also having a, a digital product that, that really can do well. I think there's always a demand for honest, local, non-biased news. And so for us, keeping a really strong reporting staff and editing staff allows us to build our digital presence, and that's the future of the business, uh, for the most part, but also committing to keeping print.

Adriana: 6:11

How many people do you have in the newsroom?

Will: 6:14

We have 30, give or take a few, at any given time, and about half of them are actually writing the stories. And then we have editors, we have multiple sets of editors look at every story before it goes to our readers, which provides a great checks and balances system for making sure the, the story's as fair and as non-biased as possible and as accurate as possible. And we have photographers, and then we have a team of our copy editors that will lay out the design of the newspaper and get it onto our website. And, you know, that's roughly 30 people of 100 total at The Columbian as a whole. And so we have, you know, roughly 100 people on staff, and a lot of them are involved with the creation of the newspaper, the operation of the press, the advertising department

Adriana: 7:02

So we've got the future, which is digital. We've got the present, which is 100 people working here. Let's go all the way back to the past. So let's jump way back through time-

Will: 7:12

Oh, okay, great… Adriana: to 1890. Yeah. In 1890, there were roughly 3,000 people in Vancouver, and it was very dependent on some industries, including fur trading was still pretty big. You know, there was… It was a small little city separated from the bigger Portland area that was, that was growing, and there was ferries bringing people across the river from Vancouver to Portland. That was the only way to, to get down to Portland at that time. In 1890, the State of Washington was one year old. You know, the idea of the newspaper is to very quickly record facts and details that in people's minds get skewed over time. Right? And so in that way, a newspaper is writing the, "the first draft of history" is what we like to say. And so The Columbian began reporting and writing and publishing as a weekly in 1890. There was two early locations, and the second location was in the second story of an old post office building that's right across the street from the Hilton in downtown Vancouver. You'd walk up the stairs, and, you know, there'd be people at the, at the reception desk a- all made of old wood, and you could hear typewriters, and there would be hot metal being transported to and from the press, and, you know, there's loud machinery happening and reporters running in and out, writing the story that from what they saw or heard somewhere in the community. The circulation in general was, was going up as the population was growing and more people were interested in, in reading what was happening. And in 1908, The Columbian began a daily publication, uh, under a publisher named E.E. Beard. And at that time in 1908, my great-grandfather had recently graduated from the University of Oregon. He wanted to go into journalism. He started planting roots in, in Portland, and he was working for The Oregonian, which at that time was owned by a famous publisher named Henry Pittock. And Pittock owned The Oregonian. He also owned another publication called The Portland Telegram. Those were two of the three big daily newspapers, and so there was The Oregonian, The Portland Telegram, and The Oregon Journal, and there was high competition for getting the best possible newspaper between these three, uh, in the day. You know, newspapers at that time were some of the most profitable and powerful businesses in any community. My great-grandfather, Herbert, was, uh, eventually working his way up through The Oregonian and eventually transferred to The Portland Telegram And one of his ideas to make The Portland Telegram better was to have a little anecdote that the printers would insert right before printing that instead of having a filler ad that would complete the margins of the column, Herbert wanted them to inject a little anecdote, uh, something that would read like, "10,000 pens can be made from one ton of metal," something like that. He went and scoured the encyclopedia, and he created this huge list of little factoids, and he had the workers kind of pre-make these little pieces of metal that they could slip into the, the end of the column if the story didn't quite reach the bottom of the margin. And the readers really loved that. And he realized that there was opportunity for other newspapers that wanted this, and so he went and hired a company to syndicate this. And over the course of two or three years in the late 1910s, he subscribed almost every daily newspaper in the, in the country too. This was his little side business that he worked on while he was an editor at the Portland Telegram. And in 1921, the Associated Press, which is the organization that unites all of the newspapers in the country and allows us to share content with one another, that organization started offering this just for free.

Adriana: 11:17

Mm.

Will: 11:17

And so, you know, his business went away pretty fast, but he had collected enough to buy his own newspaper, and so that's what he set out to do. So he set off with his wife to drive up and down the Pacific Northwest, trying to find a small newspaper that they could afford to buy to move. And so Vancouver caught his eye pretty quickly. Vancouver in 1921 had just constructed the I-5 bridge four years earlier. And so, uh, there was a lot of economic opportunity in Vancouver, and, and Herbert saw that, and so he, he bought The Columbian in 1921, and he expanded the, the reach of the newspaper to cover all of Clark County at that time. Herbert was at The Columbian between 1921 and 1941 when he died, and in that time period, he got The Columbian through the Great Depression, which was arguably the most difficult time The Columbian has faced.

Adriana: 12:20

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Will: 13:08

Mm-hmm

Adriana: 13:08

and ran the paper until your grandfather and your great-uncle took over in 1962, right?

Will: 13:16

Yeah. So Herbert died in 1941, right before World War II. His wife, Anne, became president of the paper, although she didn't really operate it. She left Herbert's editor, um, named Ray Bachman, to be the operator and managing editor and kinda the, the CEO, so to speak. And he was a pretty big force in the community also. When Herbert died, his sons Don and Jack were too young to, to join the paper. They, they needed more experience, and so they went and worked at other newspapers and had other jobs. Ray Bachman operated the newsroom and held it steady until they were ready to, to step into, into roles here at The Columbian. And my great-grandmother, Anne, she helped everything stay afloat. And during that time period in 1955, The Columbian built this current building, which is the fourth headquarters of The Columbian. Eventually, Don joined The Columbian and had more of a commercial and printing experience, and he worked his way up to become the president of operations. His younger brother, Jack, worked his way up to become the editor of The Columbian. And so two brothers were running the paper. They were both co-publishers, and they were in charge of different parts of The Columbian. Don was in charge of all the general operations, all the printing and distribution and advertising, and Jack was in charge of the content creation and the newsroom and all of the, the words that were coming out and the pictures. And so that allowed a nice template for two brothers to be able to easily divide up tasks and not really tread on each other's, you know, responsibilities. Jack passed away somewhat unexpectedly, and so Don bought those shares from Jack's estate, and Don became the sole owner of, of The Columbian. Don had five kids, and my dad was the third born out of the five. My father, he wanted to get into, you know, the newspaper industry. He joined The Columbian and worked his way up through the circulation department, which is in charge of distributing all of the newspapers. And eventually, my dad became the publisher, and he bought out his siblings from their shares. And then my dad had three sons, Ben, myself Will, and my younger brother, Ross. And he raised us with the idea that this was an opportunity if we wanted it, if we were passionate about it, and if we worked hard to, to get it. And so, when, when we were old enough, he allowed us to do internships where we'd spend maybe a week in every department to see which, which ones we like and if we were interested in. But he and my mom also, Jody, never really pressured us too much to get into it. Um, they just said if, if we were interested and we worked hard, then the opportunity was there. But they made it clear that we needed to work at another place. They really instilled the idea to us that there is this idea of nepotism that is very real and can do horrible harm to any business. And so they taught us that idea from the earliest of age. They taught us the idea of entitlement and how much it harms places and people when you think you just own something and don't respect it, and just think that you deserve it just because you are tied to it from something like family. And they also taught us the importance of just getting-- you know, working well together, and especially if we were to join the newspaper, how we would need to work together as siblings in order to not destroy our relationship as family, because they always put family before the business. My older brother, Ben, he wanted to pursue the career in The Columbian long before I did. But I, you know, I wanted to pursue other options, and it wasn't till I really fell in love with the written medium of storytelling that I wanted to come back to The Columbian. In 2015, I had pursued a career and an education in emergency medicine, and I got my EMT certification, and a big part of being an EMT is interviewing people during really difficult times and gathering a narrative. And I, I really enjoyed helping people and also documenting some event that had happened. I really liked that storytelling aspect of it. And then I decided to get into print journalism. And then I went to the University of Oregon, got my bachelor's degree in journalism, and also worked for the student newspaper at the University of Oregon. I graduated in 2017 and worked at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, which happened to be in the building next door to where my great-grandfather Herbert worked for the Spokane Chronicle. And then I came back to The Columbian full-time. One of my tasks was to develop a program or a partnership with a nonprofit that would allow us to collect tax-deductible donations in our community, that we could use those donations to hire reporters that we otherwise wouldn't have. So when I created that partnership called Community Funded Journalism, then I went and, with the help of my family and the staff here, found donors that were willing to step up and, and support local journalism for an industry that's extremely important for our democracy and our community. We were able to raise more than $1.3 million within, within months, and we hired new reporters, and we've been covering housing and homelessness and transportation, environment and health and, and hospitals and, and nonprofits with those reporters.

Adriana: 19:21

That's really cool.

Will: 19:21

Yeah.

Adriana: 19:22

So your structure currently with the paper is back to this two brothers, one who's doing the editing side of things, that's you. And then Ben, who's doing the, as you said, the rest of the building.

Will: 19:37

Yeah.

Adriana: 19:38

I love that. One of the things I really enjoyed during our tour was the archives.

Will: 19:43

Yeah.

Adriana: 19:44

And I wondered if you would mention that a little bit.

Will: 19:45

Yeah. So archives. So every edition that the newspaper prints- keeps a couple copies in an archive, and those would be compiled in boxes and be put away, you know, since 1890. And eventually we were able to get technology that would photograph every page and then put it on film, on what's called microfilm. So we have an edition of every Columbian print since 1890. And then we have every edition also on microfilm, uh, since 1890. And then we had a period between 1970 and 1980 when we had librarians working at The Columbian. They would clip out every article that a reporter had written and file it away by category and date in order to find that information as quickly as possible. And once computer databases came online, then that work just became absolutely redundant and was kind of rendered useless by the invention of computers. Uh, we still have that, those, uh, clippings by the way, and they're pretty incredible to look at. But yeah, so once we had got computer databases, then we had a s- you know, another backup for our archives. So we had all of our prints, we had our microfilm, and then we had computer databases holding digital versions of all this. It's a very important thing to have. I mean, this is the history of our community that we have in these archives, and I can't even think about what a community without a newspaper archive would look like.

Adriana: 21:25

Mm-hmm.

Will: 21:26

The ability to record facts and, and ideas and events and get details and get people's thoughts on them and put people's names in the paper, it's so important for any community now, obviously the amount of data right now on the Internet is, is far greater than anything else, but it's also so muddied by AI now and by you don't know what's true or what's false. And we have The Columbian newsroom still recording what, uh, we believe is the most non-biased and true version of an event happening, and, uh, we- we're still doing that every day. And so when historians look back on this time period long in the future, they'll be able to look at The Columbian and say, "Okay, this community still had a group of people that, you know, had a lot of reporting staff that still had these standards," and it's easily accessible to find these stories and to know what's happening in the community. But in many communities that have lost the ability to have a newsroom or have stripped it down so, so much that there's only a few people writing about only the biggest things happening at such a small level, a lot of people online are, are the ones that are recording a lot of the history that's happening in those, especially those smaller communities. And then, you know, how are historians gonna be able to, to decipher what's, what's real and what's not in communities that don't have the newspapers of record. Mm-hmm. It, uh, so it's- Mm-hmm … it's, it's, uh… it's a weird time in the media industry. There's just a mind-boggling amount of misinformation that's online. Like, if you were to take a snapshot of the internet in one day and have that be reflected in what is in a newspaper, a day of a newspaper, I mean, there would just be so much misinformation and lies and weird things, and it's not really being edited as a whole. People will put things on social media, and there are some pretty loose policies from what, uh, you know, Meta or Google or any of these, these social media companies will allow. And, you know, it's caused a lot of confusion and a lot of misinformation. And what we provide at, with The Columbian is just cutting through all that and showing people what, what the facts are, what people are saying. If we're writing a story about a politician that says, "This ordinance will do this," then we're solidifying that into words that kinda hold that politician accountable and, you know, some people will think that that politician might be being dishonest, and we're just the medium that's solidifying their promise into, uh, into print or into words online. It allows our community to understand what's going on without having to deal with all of the misinformation that's flying around.

Adriana: 24:30

Well, thank you for your service.[laughs] Because what a mess. Yeah. It's really hard.

Will: 24:35

It's crazy. There will always be a demand for print media, right? It might be shrinking as a percentage of the population demand, but also in a growing population, there's going to be new people wanting print media. There is this cyclical nature to generations that will start to kinda reject or, or reimagine ways of doing things that the old generation has been stuck with or, or grew up with. And so, yeah, I mean, I see younger people becoming interested in, in the newspaper, and analog photography, film photography, uh, vinyl records you know, there's always going to be a demand there. We're reaching more readers than ever before, by far. We have over 550,000 unique visitors to our website every month, and we that.

Adriana: 25:32

It's amazing to think back and think of what Herbert would think if, you know, if you popped over one day and just said, "Hey, Great Grandpa, guess what? 550,000 people are reading our paper every month," you know? That's an amazing thing. All right. I'm gonna wrap us up because I didn't wanna- Yeah … take up too much more of your time. So in just a minute, I'm going to ask you, Will, my favorite question, which is to shout out another organization in Clark County that you wanna shine a little light on. And while you're thinking about that, I'll remind everybody that if you would like to sign up for our newsletter, the link is in the show notes. That's where we send out event updates, and we also share links to see photos and videos of our podcast guests. When you sign up for our newsletter, you are helping us grow and support this free arts and culture content. And as we know, keeping small and independent journalism alive is a labor of love, so you can help us out by subscribing to our newsletter. So Will, who would you like to shout out?

Will: 26:35

I wanna shout out the Clark County Historical Museum, where, as we at The Columbian are writing the first draft of history, the Clark County Historical Museum is helping write the next draft and looking at our work and telling a larger version of that story in many different ways. And they've brought a lot of enlightenment to our community, and I'm very grateful for that.

Adriana: 27:00

Me too. We love them, and they were one of our first interviews. They are wonderful. Will, thank you so much for welcoming me today. I really enjoyed our time together.

Will: 27:09

Thank you. Yeah. I, I appreciate you. Thank you.

Adriana: 27:14

And now is the time of the show where we get to hear from you. This is our Community Voices segment, where you call in and let us know your favorite places in local arts, culture, and heritage. Community Voices is sponsored by Johnson Bixby. Their financial planning and portfolio management team combines technical expertise with genuine care, helping you make informed, confident decisions at all stages of life, and plan for life's possibilities. Advisory services by Johnson Bixby, SEC registered. Securities through private client services, member FINRA, SIPC.

Guest: 27:55

Hi, I'm Greta, and I'm really into the Fort Vancouver Regional Library system. My name is Olivia, and, uh, my partner and I just moved to Clark County, and one of our favorite coffee shops is River Maiden. Um, this is gonna sound very millennial of me, but they have some of the best avocado toast. They have two kinds. Um, you can't go wrong with any of their other food items either, but, uh, go… We love River Maiden. We'd love to hear from you. What are your favorite spots in Clark County? Who really deserves a shout-out? Give us a call and leave a message or send us a voice note via email. All the details on how to do that are in the show notes. If you liked today's episode and wanna hear more about our local history from the last few hundred years, you can check out our interview from March 3rd with the Two Rivers Heritage Museum. It's called The Stories Beneath Our Streets. And our interview from December 30th with the Clark County Historical Museum, that one is called The Story of Us: Clark County Then and Now. I'm Into This Place is produced and edited by me, Adriana Baer, engineering and mixing by Shawn Lee Martin. A special thanks today to Kate Sacamano and the entire Columbian team who let me sneak around during a tour to see all the behind-the-scenes magic. This episode was recorded on site at The Columbian newspaper. You can find out more about us and them at imintothisplace.com. See you out there!