In the wake of the East Oregonian cutting most local sports coverage, high schools in the InterMountain Education Service District provided funding to contract sports writer Annie Fowler.
On June 3, the EO Media Group’s employees were notified they were being laid off and their jobs being eliminated. Amongst the employees, Fowler, a sports reporter for East Oregonian, was let go and the EO’s sports section was rolled back.
Umatilla School District Superintendent Heidi Sipe said high school sports are an important fabric of small town life.
“We were all really saddened by the loss of sports coverage in Eastern Oregon,” she said. “And high school sports are a big contributor to community connectedness.”
The InterMountain ESD reached out to high schools across the district to see if they would be willing to dig in their pockets to pay Fowler and help revive local sports media coverage.
“In Eastern Oregon, when something’s going awry, we help each other out,” Sipe said. “And in this case, we knew that there was going to be lost history, lost stories, and, honestly, a loss of community connection. And so we pulled together, like we always do, to come up with something that we could collaborate on.”
Eighteen schools in Morrow, Umatilla, Baker and Union counties placed money in the collection basket with each school paying $11.21 per student:
• Baker County high schools — Burnt River.
• Morrow County high schools—Ione, Irrigon, Heppner and Riverside (Boardman).
• Umatilla County high schools — Echo, Griswold (Helix), Milton-Freewater, Pilot Rock, Stanfield, Ukiah, Umatilla and Weston-McEwen (Athena).
• Union County high schools — Elgin, La Grande, Imbler, North Powder and Union.
Some schools paid through budget costs and donations, others settled up with booster funds and communication services, some dipped into the athletic funding.
With 35 years of experience under her belt, Fowler has been essential to covering local sports in Oregon and Washington. Through the span of her career, she has written for a number of publications and racked up several accolades for her work.
“I’m just happy to be back,” Fowler said. “I think it’s important that young people have positivity in their life and this is one way we can do that.”
InterMountain ESD Superintendent Mark Mulvihill said to develop an organized system for schools to receive reports on their teams, they created a centralized article database through Google Drive for Fowler to turn in her articles. Local high schools will pull out their news from their folders and publish it on their school’s website and social media platforms.
In addition, high school athletic coaches are to communicate with Fowler and keep her up to speed with their games, Mulvihill said.
Fowler said she plans to go out to cover sports games but cannot attend every game in the region, especially when so many are simultaneous. For the most part she will gather information from coaches and count on receiving photos from community photographers.
Apart from her new contracted job with InterMountain ESD, Fowler also is a freelance sports reporter for the Confederated Umatilla Journal, the newspaper the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation publishes.
