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113 years of trying By Bill Miller Oct 16, 2022 12:30 AM A A Ever since I began tinkering with computers, I’ve been told it wouldn’t be long before we’d all be living in a “paperless society.” Well, over 40 years later, it hasn’t happened — yet. However, because you’re reading this right now, you already know that on Oct. 1 this year, for the first time in almost exactly 113 years, the Mail Tribune, indeed, joined the paperless society. Changes are inevitable in any business, and over the years the Mail Tribune has seen its share. There were new printing presses, new buildings, new procedures, new editors and new staff, but one thing was always a constant — paper. Some will trace the Mail Tribune’s birth to 1884, when Medford was barely a bump in the middle of a manzanita field, buried in sticky, winter mud. However, until Nov. 1, 1909, when four newspapers officially merged, there was no Mail Tribune. The Mail, the first of the merging newspapers, began publishing in 1888 as the Southern Oregon Mail, a weekly newspaper that struggled to survive through at least three different owners before Albert Bliton bought it in 1893 and changed its name. While other newspapers came and went, Bliton’s, The Mail, survived. In March 1906, Bliton’s trouble finally arrived. J.M. Potter moved his Ashland Tribune newspaper to Medford and renamed it the Medford Daily Tribune. Within a month, Albert Bliton accused Potter of “soliciting Mail employees to accept employment” with the Tribune. It was just the beginning of heated competition between the two newspapers. It’s unclear whether Bliton actually published a separate daily newspaper to compete; however, soon his weekly newspaper began including columns highlighting brief news items from the previous days of the week. By fall 1907, when George Putnam took over the Tribune, Bliton probably didn’t realize he already was in trouble. Putnam had formidable newspaper credentials. Graduating from University of Nebraska, he came west and began his career in 1896 as a reporter in San Diego. By 1899, he was manager for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. From 1902 until his arrival in Medford, he had established a newspaper in Spokane, Washington, and been editor for a Eureka, California, newspaper before becoming news editor for the Oregon Journal in Portland. Putnam was described as a “crusader.” He began his local editorial battles by attacking what he saw as public wrongs. “Was there any water ever made dirtier than that now being pumped into the city water mains?” he asked in a December 1907 editorial. That editorial, and others that followed, made him many enemies, but Putman was undeterred. He strongly believed in freedom of the press and the betterment of society, and he wasn’t interested in compromise with opponents. At the end of March 1909, about seven months before the new Mail Tribune would launch, Putnam was celebrating in an editorial the fourth anniversary of the Medford Daily Tribune. “It is the patriotism and the personal sacrifice that have made this city what it is today and made The Tribune possible,” he said. “Its career has been more or less stormy. … The Tribune has enemies, but the paper that has no enemies has no friends. … The Tribune has critics, but The Tribune has something to say and intends to be a vital force in the life of the community.” On Nov. 1, 1909, The Mail, The Medford Daily Tribune, Southern Oregonian and the Jacksonville Times newspapers consolidated as the Medford Mail Tribune. In his first editorial for the new newspaper, Putnam pledged, “The Mail Tribune will be independent in politics and neutral in local faction fights. … The merger has been brought about by the recognition of the necessity of a first-class daily to ‘mark time.’” Since then — on paper or not — it’s been 113 years of trying. Writer Bill Miller is the author of six books, including “Spanning the Defiant Sea, Women Pilots Dare Atlantic Air.” Reach him at [email protected].