Eugene Weekly Press Club’s mission is to support local journalism and train future journalists in Oregon with an emphasis on news sources in the Willamette Valley. The project’s focus is on long-form, long-term, investigative, community-focused and solutions journalism from hard news to the arts. In particular, EWPC seeks to support smaller, independent newspapers covering needed community issues and those in underserved areas, particularly rural areas of Lane County, and covering underserved populations. Award-winning work includes Eugene Weekly‘s obituaries for the unhoused series, honoring people who die homeless in the community whose deaths would otherwise go unremarked.

Big Red Box is a community initiative dedicated to strengthening independent local journalism in Lane  County by building philanthropic support for Eugene Weekly and initiatives that advance civic  engagement, journalism education and public service. It begins by securing the newspaper’s longtime  home, creating the stability needed for Eugene Weekly to fulfill its journalistic mission while laying the  foundation for a broader community-supported model of stewardship. 

For more than 30 years, Eugene Weekly has operated from the same downtown-area building, which  was owned by the paper’s longtime co-owner, Anita Johnson. Following her death in 2024, the building  was put up for sale. As the newspaper was recovering from the devastating embezzlement that nearly  forced it to permanently close in late 2023 — and was saved only because the community contributed  hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring it back — the community was presented with another  extraordinary opportunity: to preserve not only a building, but the stability, independence, and security it  provides while protecting Eugene Weekly from displacement.  

The long-term vision for Big Red Box reaches far beyond the building itself. The initiative is intended to  become an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening and sustaining local  journalism in Lane County. Over time, Big Red Box will steward community assets, provide  philanthropic support for Eugene Weekly, and ultimately, become the newspaper’s nonprofit owner,  ensuring it remains locally rooted, community-supported, and editorially independent. 

Big Red Box was created not simply to purchase a building, but to transform a moment of uncertainty into an enduring community investment in independent local journalism.