Who We Are
For 97 years the Molalla Pioneer has served the news and advertising needs of the residents and businesses of the Molalla area. The Pioneer is owned by Pamplin Media Group, one of the largest weekly newspaper chains in the Northwest. However, each newspaper, including the Pioneer, is locally managed and operated.
The winner of numerous journalism and advertising awards, the weekly Molalla Pioneer newspaper is run by publisher Joe Wilson.
The Pioneer presently employs five full-time people in its downtown Molalla office — two in the news department, two in advertising and a publisher. The Pioneer shares circulation, production and bookkeeping staff with its sister paper, the Canby Herald. The Pioneer’s annual payroll is more than $240,000. Much of that money is spent locally.
Besides Molalla, we serve several adjoining communities. Those communities are Mulino, Colton and Beavercreek and include the following zip codes: 97004, 97017, 97042 and 97038.
According to the U.S Postal Service, there are 7,383 homes and business addresses in our circulation area. In this area, the Pioneer distributes 3,600 newspapers meaning that 50 percent of all the households and businesses we could possibly serve are buying a copy of the newspaper each week. In addition, our free North Willamette News shoppers reach a total of 3,465 more addresses putting our classified and classified display ads in front of 95 percent of all residents and businesses in the area. This is all audited information. No other publication or medium even comes close to that kind of market penetration.
Then there’s our website. Each month an average of 5,000 people visit our website. Together they view an average of 153,756 pages. That means each person is looking at an average of 30 different pages on our website each month. All of this can also be verified because it is audited.
Between the 5,000 people who read our news and advertising online each month and the 7,065 people who read our printed products every week, we are achieving more than 100 percent coverage of the consumers in the Molalla area all year long (some people are reading both the printed newspaper and the website).
We are a business — we have payrolls to meet and overhead to cover, like all other businesses. Newspapers and our accompanying websites are information vehicles. We deliver news and advertising to the homes and businesses in our coverage area. To survive, newspapers need a healthy business community. Therefore, it is our job to encourage businesses to tell readers (their current customers and potential customers) what products and services they have to offer. In our competitive and mobile society, it is absolutely necessary for us and our advertisers to inform our communities of the advantages of shopping locally.
Community newspapers such as the Pioneer specialize in local news. There is no other place to find this type of news. We do not print state or national news except where it applies locally.
Our newspaper is a proud member of the National Newspaper Association and the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association.
