Original announcement: Reconnect with Golden Era

Yes, time burnishes memories. But nuggets of truth glitter in what often can be heard from Register-Guard newsroom folks of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. We lived and worked in what newspaper veterans of that period call the golden era. Locally, that fortunate happening was a confluence of time, talent, personalities and resources. It was a tumultuous epoch in which our national culture was being reshaped and print journalism was reaching a high-water mark.

At the dawn of the 1970s, the R-G’s contingent of the Greatest Generation — guys from the World War II era and slightly later — were settled journeymen but no longer youthful hard chargers. The paper still had musty trappings of the 1950s and even the 1930s.

But as some troubadour was telling us, the times they were a-changin.’ As were generations. Talented J-school grads were filling R-G slots opened by retirements and by expansion of the news, sports and photo operations. Some, thankfully, were women, impossible though it once seemed.

Younger journalists had the bit in their teeth and were showing senior management what was possible. In retrospect, you can see how the culture of the nation’s newsrooms, including ours, was influenced by the societal churn of the ’60s and ’70s. Secondly, we were beneficiaries of the Watergate Surge, which lifted our collective reputation and spurred our ambitions. These two currents made us more aggressive in our hard news work and more creative in our feature material.

Finally, there’s the fortunate fact that newspapers were making real money through the ’70s and ’80s. At the R-G it showed not only in staff expansion but in the stories and projects that were greenlighted. We probed the nuclear power industry, we outed an academic/athletic cheating scandal at the UO, we brought new vigor to the task of holding local officials to account, we escorted readers to unfamiliar places with deep, creative feature projects.

The momentum of that era carried us well into the ’80s and sustained the R-G until the pressures of the Internet era began to decimate print journalism in the early ’90s.

— Mike Thoele