The Register-Guard.

With the recent death of The Springfield News, Springfield became the biggest city in Oregon that doesn't have a newspaper. That unhappy distinction has less to do with Springfield than with Davenport, Iowa.

Davenport is where Lee Enterprises is headquartered, and it is there that the sad fate of The Springfield News was decided.

Springfield, with a population of 55,000 and a strong community identity, ought to be able to support a weekly or biweekly newspaper. Indeed, the News served Springfield for more than a century, through times flush and flat. Smaller cities in Lane County - Cottage Grove, Creswell, Florence, Junction City, Oakridge, Veneta - have weekly newspapers. Proximity to Eugene shouldn't be a problem; the shadows of daily newspapers in Portland, Bend and Salem haven't kept the nearby communities of Tigard, Redmond and Keizer from having their own newspapers.

But The Springfield News had the misfortune of becoming an expendable piece on a corporate chessboard. Its progress toward pawndom began with the loss of local ownership in the 1970s, when Glenn Jackson, an Oregon utility and publishing magnate, added the News to his newspaper company. It accelerated after Jackson's death in 1980, when his group of newspapers was sold to Capital Cities Communications of New York City. Cap Cities then merged with the ABC television network, and in 1995 the Disney Co. bought the combined company. Disney divested itself of the Cap Cities part of its acquisition in 1997, selling its Oregon newspapers to Lee Enterprises.

With each transaction, The Springfield News became less important to those who owned it. It was far down the list of Lee's priorities, even though it needed an infusion of capital. The Springfield News had long relied on its commercial printing operation for revenue - The Oregon Daily Emerald and many other local publications were printed there. But the 1997 purchase gave Lee ownership of the Albany Democrat-Herald as well as The Springfield News, and the decision-makers in Davenport saw no reason to invest in new printing equipment in Springfield when the company had a press 45 miles up the freeway in Albany. The News closed its printing plant earlier this year.

As the most profitable side of its business shifted to Albany, the newspaper began gasping for air. It cut back on its twice-a-week publication schedule, becoming a weekly. The newspaper stopped seeking subscribers, and instead mailed free copies to households throughout the Springfield area. That last move was an attempt to surrender subscription revenue in exchange for more advertising income. It didn't work.

Or it didn't work well enough. In mid-2005, Lee completed its biggest acquisition ever - the $1.46 billion purchase of the Pulitzer newspaper group. This was a big step for Lee, giving the company its first metropolitan daily, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, along with a string of other dailies, including The Coos Bay World.

Lee now has 51 daily newspapers and 300 weekly and specialty publications. Each of those properties needs to show short-term profit potential to help Lee carry its debt load and reverse a slide in its stock price.

The Springfield News looked like a loser, or not enough of a winner. So after unsuccessfully seeking a buyer, Lee shut it down.

Newspapers everywhere are facing pressure from competitors ranging from the Internet to the U.S. Postal Service. But The Springfield News survived the advent of radio, the movies, television and the emergence of The Register-Guard as a dominant print competitor. What it couldn't survive is the cold calculus that directed corporate resources away from Springfield while also demanding consistently strong financial results.

The Springfield News lasted more than a century because it mattered to Springfield. It's gone now because it didn't matter to Davenport.