The City of Hillsboro is the biggest media outlet in town

I’ve been the only journalist at Hillsboro City Council meetings for a couple of months now, so far as I can tell. Which is odd, because this is a city of 100,000 people, the economic engine of the state, and I’m just a citizen journalist.

I’m a volunteer. I have no budget, no advertisers, and no desire to build a business model. I started doing this a year ago as an experiment, and it’s one I plan to continue. But I haven’t had much success generating interest, probably because I’m a better blogger than I am a promoter.

The City of Hillsboro, meanwhile, is very good at getting its own point of view across. During a recent city council meeting Patrick Preston, Public Affairs Manager for Hillsboro, outlined the reach of the city’s communications efforts:

• 60,000 visitors each month to the website
• 53,000 people reached on social media
• 45,000 “City Views” newsletters delivered every two months
• Creciendo Juntos, the Spanish language newsletter, is distributed to 1,000 households four times a year.
• 364 YouTube videos have been viewed a total of 240,000 times

It’s an impressive array of numbers. I’d be thrilled to do half as well. Then again, the city has the resources to do this, which is more than you can say about any media outlet currently covering the city.

“We cannot rely on our busy community members to come to us for information,” said Preston. “We need to be meeting them where they are.”

At one point the local newspaper would do that work. The Hillsboro Tribune does a great job, but ad revenues alone aren’t enough to pay skilled reporters a salary that keeps them around long-term, which means turnover. I’ve been covering city politics for a year now, and so far as I can tell that makes me the longest-serving reporter on this beat, and I mostly do it in between writing blog posts for my day job.

So the city feels the need to reach out to residents itself, playing the role of the media. I can’t really blame them—the role needs to be filled and they’re doing a good job of it. But I hope eventually we can grow the Signal to the point where “state media” isn’t the biggest player. Get in touch if you want to help.