Most mornings the phone still rings. Rick on one end, Justin on the other, coffee going, and the day sorting itself out: what just went live, what is next, and who still needs a call. For the last year that line has run between Depoe Bay and Lincoln City, with the Pacific right outside the window. Now it stretches farther east.
Rick Beasley and Justin Werner are opening a sister site. Boise Beacon is live at boisebeacon.news. It covers Boise, Nampa, Meridian, the Treasure Valley, surrounding cities, and the State of Idaho at large. The same two publishers. The same independent newsroom standards. A much bigger map.
On September 11, 2025, they launched Boiler Bay Beacon as an independent paper for Lincoln County. No chain. No distant desk deciding what the coast was allowed to care about. They posted the Society of Professional Journalists code and actually used it: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable. Rick brought decades on this shore, more than two dozen journalism awards, a long run at the Newport News-Times, and the earlier Depoe Bay Beacon already in his hands. Justin brought the systems and the reporting experience from building Lincoln City Homepage from nothing into a paper the city used, then starting again when the need for an independent voice was clear.
A year later the numbers were plain. In a county of roughly 50,000 people, Boiler Bay Beacon drew more than a million page views. Readers came back for the police logs, the exclusive on the Depoe Bay settlement, the hospitals and statutes, the crab prices, the storms, the schools, the ordinary Tuesday night video. Local news dies when people stop needing it. On the Oregon coast they did not stop.
Lincoln County is small. The Treasure Valley is not. Ada and Canyon counties alone are home to more than 875,000 people by recent planning estimates. The broader Boise metro is in the same range. The State of Idaho is more than two million. That is roughly seventeen times the population of the county that just produced a million-plus reads in one year, and closer to forty times if the whole state is in view. The math is not a forecast. It is the scale of the place. If the same hunger for local reporting that does not answer to a corporate chain or a donor list exists in Boise, Nampa, Meridian, and the towns around them, the numbers can be large. The work that earns the habit is the same work.
Boise Beacon will run on the same model. Independent. Free from corporate ownership. Built to cover City Hall, county business, schools, growth, public safety, the legislature, and the stories that do not fit a wire-service template. Rick will still write like a reporter who walks the ground. Justin will still build the systems that let a small newsroom publish, defend its original work, and stay online when the lights flicker. Both will keep the ordinary light on: the daily record, the public documents people can actually use, the community pieces that make a place legible to the people who live there.
Beacon Media is the umbrella. Boiler Bay Beacon stays the coastal paper. Boise Beacon is the new sister for the Treasure Valley and the state. The phones will still ring. The coffee will still be hot. The promise is the same one that was posted on day one: seek truth and report it.
The site is boisebeacon.news. The first year on the coast showed what two people and a county that still wants its own paper can do. Idaho is larger. The work starts now.