The Jackson Rancheria Band of Miwuk Indians has become something rare: an Indian tribe that owns a newspaper. Since it also owns a casino that operates in the largely rural Amador County in Northern California, that has caused some raised eyebrows.
The tribe last week announced that it had purchased the Amador Ledger Dispatch, a weekly that was founded in 1855, for an announced price of $1 million. The tribe said it planned the fold the paper’s operations into the Acorn News, which the tribe created recently.
The Ledger Dispatch had been purchased three years by a media company which immediately deemphasized the paper’s print operations and focused almost exclusively online. This caused a mini-revolt among the paper’s staff, with the most important members abandoning the paper, including its publisher Jack Mitchell, who assisted the tribe in starting the Acorn News as a competing newspaper. Acorn stands for Amador & Calaveras Objective Regional News.
Since the tribe’s new purchase will be reporting not only on the tribe’s casino, the Jackson Rancheria Casino Resort but also about a possible rival gaming tribe, the Buena Vista Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians, which is mulling a casino of its own in nearby Ione, some are suggesting that it may be hard for the paper to maintain its customary journalistic integrity.
However, Rich Hoffman chief executive officer of the tribe and the casino, told the Sacramento Bee that the paper will be published independently: “The tribe is committed to maintaining the properly ethical separation between business and editorial,” he said. The Acorn is currently published from the Jackson Rancheria tribal offices but at some point will find an office in Jackson, where the Ledger Dispatch has been published, he said.
The paper will continue to be called Acorn News. Hoffman noted that the Ledger Dispatch during its long history has had several names. The tribe sees the Acorn name as a “fresh start.”
