While the picture painted here so far is concerning, it’s important to note that the same digital disruption that seriously weakened the traditional model for local news has also helped power the emergence of non-profit and commercial start-ups that are emerging to fill community information needs. And the same journalistic impulse to tell stories, document, and investigate that has powered local news for many decades is evident in these new start-ups as well—in many cases supported by concerned citizens, donors, and philanthropists. Since 2022, even while traditional newspapers have been closing and contracting, other newsrooms have been launched or are in the process of launching, including some promising partnerships. We begin by reviewing some larger-scale efforts, then we turn to smaller hyper-local start-ups.
Oregon Journalism Project
Launched in 2024 and headed by the longtime editor and co-owner of Willamette Week, Mark Zusman, the non-profit Oregon Journalism Project (OJP) is, Zusman says, “a response to the statewide decline of local news in general, and impactful investigative journalism in particular, over the past quarter century.” According to OJP’s website, “Out-of-state ownership and business-model disruptions have left Oregon with media enterprises unwilling and unable to devote sufficient resources to quality, independent local journalism.” In early 2025, Zusman told Editor & Publisher that “I’ve been on a two-year journey to determine how to expand the investigative, watchdog and explanatory journalism we do in Portland to the rest of the state, which is filled with news deserts.” Zusman told us the goal is to be “an AP [Associated Press] for Oregon” with a focus on investigative journalism to “address the most serious challenges facing the state.”
What makes OJP’s model different is not just their exclusive focus on investigative journalism, but their model of content sharing. Zusman says OJP (a non-profit newsroom) is focused on areas of the state “disserved by ghost newsrooms or no newsrooms” and so is hoping to pick a partner in every area of state to share exclusive access content for free. (As of this writing in early 2025, there were 34, including the soon-to-launch Lookout Eugene-Springfield and the Bend Source). Zusman told us, “We aren’t doing SEO” (search engine optimization) for the OJP website—in fact, he said, “we don’t care about our own website. We just want the stories published around the state to get readership to other newspapers.”
Moreover, OJP’s aim is to develop investigative journalism capacity across the state, especially in rural areas, and to train the next generation of investigative journalists. While building its own statewide newsroom, eventually by locating OJP reporters around the state, OJP also plans to work with partner outlets to develop their own investigative work, by sharing expertise and resources. “We hope to create a rising tide to lift all boats,” Zusman told us.
Lookout Eugene-Springfield
Another new addition to the Oregon news ecosystem is the launch of Lookout Eugene-Springfield. Modeled on Lookout Santa Cruz, it is the brainchild of longtime journalist, media analyst, and former Eugene resident Ken Doctor. Doctor, whose essays and reports on the media business have shaped thinking across the industry for years, describes Lookout as “my own model of local news revival.” As he explained the model to us, “The ethos of Lookout,” a for-profit newsroom, is community betterment. The reason communities need strong local news sources they can trust is so they can solve their problems and make communities better for everyone.”
Doctor says Lookout Eugene-Springfield will “offer a full range of community content, from government and education, to food, arts and entertainment” along with coverage of everything from “wine, aging, high school sports, and…business news.” Key parts of the model include a “civic partners” program featuring the work of local nonprofits, outreach to local schools through a “Lookout In the Classroom” program, and “Lookout Listens” community conversations to learn what issues and stories the local community wants to see covered. Community engagement is thus a key element of Lookout’s mission and business model. As Doctor told us, “Convening should be a superpower for local media.”
Lookout Eugene-Springfield also plans content-sharing partnerships with other media. In January of 2025, it announced that it would partner with the non-profit Oregon Journalism Project to carry OJP coverage that is “telling and useful to local readers.” Doctor told us Lookout’s primary focus will be on the Eugene-Springfield area, with an eye toward helping to serve the whole of Lane County to “do what we can to help with rural journalism” as well.
The Lookout model has won attention because it appears to be relatively financially successful in a sector wracked by economic turmoil. Doctor’s approach to profitability stands out in an industry increasingly dominated by cost-cutting: “We could be quote-unquote ‘profitable,’” he told Nieman Report, “if we had fewer people in the newsroom. But the right thing to do, as long as we can gain the funding, is to invest — which, of course, turns that flywheel of more stories, which means more pageviews, which means more advertising revenue, which means more membership revenue.”
In that interview, Doctor said that expanding to Eugene-Springfield reflects a specific strategy, as it is “a good-sized city that has a significant-sized group of college-educated, affluent people and a daily newspaper that has been decimated a chain owner’s budget cuts” (referring to the Eugene Register-Guard). He plans to expand Lookout into three more cities by the end of 2026. Analysts nationwide are watching what happens next. As the Nieman Lab wrote in September of 2024, “There are so many American cities whose once-respectable daily newspapers have been hollowed out by plundering chains. If Lookout succeeds, it’ll have created a model that can help fill those voids at scale.”
Uplift Local
A new organization aiming to become a news provider to underserved communities is Uplift Local. It describes itself as a news service that plans to cover public meetings with citizen “documenters” and produce Spanish-language local news and information, initially focusing on communities along the Columbia Gorge. This kind of boots on the ground local reporting on local government has been lost at many resource-strapped media outlets.
Founded by three longtime Oregon journalists—John Schrag, former executive editor with Pamplin Media Group, investigative reporter Lee van der Voo, and reporter/producer Emily Harris—this new effort grew out of the Oregon News Exploration (ONE), a three-year project to understand news and information habits and needs in communities around the state. Funded by private donations and the Oregon Community Foundation, ONE’s surveys and focus groups found that Oregon’s rural communities and communities of color often feel misrepresented in or absent from the news. As they delved deeper, Schrag told us, ONE learned that “Rural Oregonians are longing for the type of news they once had when they had a local newspaper [when] there were journalists were paying attention to their schools, city halls, events.”
But the same isn’t necessarily true for communities whose primary language is not English. Harris, van der Voo and Schrag are “steeped in investigative, data-driven, and accountability reporting,” says Schrag, but “our research showed that [while] consumers appreciate that and many would like to see more, it’s not what they need the most.” So, Schrag says, “we followed our research, and where we ended up is not where we expected to go.”
Building upon that work, Uplift Local focuses on the needs of linguistic minority communities, particularly Spanish speakers, who have historically not been well-served by local news—communities where they saw lack of engagement with and trust in local media, and whose information needs are specific. “English speakers say they need information on the planning commission, ports, transit agencies, et cetera,” Schrag told us. “Spanish speakers didn’t mention local government reporting at all.” What those communities really want, Schrag says, “is just basic information – not ‘news.’ If we see smoke, is that a prescribed burn? It’s snowing—will the school buses be on time? These communities have to hope someone posts that information somewhere and in Spanish.” “In a world in which all the signposts are in English,” Schrag says, these communities are looking for “accessible, locally-grounded, daily information” – and not only information translated from English, but written by and for Spanish speakers.
Uplift Local also plans to start covering public meetings in the Gorge through a Documenters program—one of the first in a rural community—that trains and compensates community members to attend and take notes on public meetings; the notes are then made public for journalists and the public. Uplift Local is recruiting bilingual Documenters, with additional plans to hire community members to report primarily in Spanish. With plans to expand into news for Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking communities in the greater Portland area, Schrag describes Uplift Local as “a new, scalable model to empower underserved communities.”
The launch of these major new organizations is a bright spot in the midst of the declines and contractions in local news around the state. And each offers potentially important models for the future of local news.
At the same time, organizations like Lookout and Oregon Journalism Project will not fill all of Oregon’s news and information gaps, particularly in the state’s news deserts and near-deserts. For example, despite the well-documented decline in quality at the Eugene Register-Guard in the years since it was acquired by GateHouse Media, Eugene is not a news desert. Currently served by a number of media outlets, residents of the Eugene-Springfield area don’t face the same dearth of locally relevant news as residents of communities like the city of St. Helens, which lost its local paper in 2024, or Sherman county, which has lacked any identifiable local news outlets for years. Moreover, donors and foundations interested in financially supporting local news may be drawn to higher-profile start-ups like Oregon Journalism Project or Lookout, potentially siphoning dollars away from small community newspapers, digital start-ups, and others that are laboring to still serve communities that are one closure away from becoming news deserts. (For his part, Doctor says that Lookout has raised funds primarily from the Eugene area and is not drawing away funders from other parts of the state.)
While these larger, better-funded projects will undoubtedly be important to the future of Oregon’s local news ecosystem, it will be up to other, smaller start-ups to fill other news and information gaps around the state.
Hyper-local Start-Ups
In our 2022 report, we featured some small new outlets that were emerging to fill community news and information gaps. Today, many of those are seeing positive growth. For example, in 2022 we featured YachatsNews, a non-profit based in south Lincoln County that was founded in 2019 by longtime journalist Quinton Smith. At that time, Smith told us, “There’s lots of opportunities for things that I’m doing, but the question of course is, can it be monetized…and how should it be.” Today, Smith is in a better position to answer that question. Now renamed the Lincoln Chronicle “to better reflect what we currently cover and what more that we will be doing with the addition of another reporter,” Smith is adding both readership and reporting capacity. Smith told us the site’s page views reached 2 million in 2024, a 22 percent increase from 2023, and the outlet raised enough money through donations and grants to hire their second full-time reporter based in Newport to cover county government, education, housing and homelessness and other issues. This growth, Smith says, shows that “in ‘news deserts’ there is a great desire for local, professionally reported news.”
Some losses in local news have been offset by new hyper-local sites. Axios, the national news company started in 2017 by the founders of Politico that has been adding “Local” sites in cities around the country, came to Portland in 2023 and attracted former readers of the hyper-local newsletter Bridgeliner. Based on a subscription model, Axios Portland produces a daily newsletter, breaking news alerts, and guides to local schools, jobs, and real estate. Noting that “Local reporting has been obliterated by technology, private equity cash and new consumer habits,” Axios’s founders believe that “Too many falsely assume local reporting can’t be revitalized profitably.” Instead, they believe, it can, if “you meet your readers’ needs, put your investment into people, not paper or property, [and] create a new, healthy daily [news] habit.”
Chas Hundley would likely agree. In 2017, Hundley launched the Banks Post and the Gales Creek Journal, digital-first hyper-local sites that now have developed limited print circulation. Hundley told us that the Post and the Journal—which are a “one-man show” owned, operated, and populated with content solely by him—are “doing a lot of basic journalism—school boards, elections, school plays. “If we don’t do that,” he said, “the only thing that fills that void is social media, which can be wildly inaccurate and filled with rumors.” He hopes to help his readers cultivate new news habits while providing basic journalism that connects people to their communities: “Here’s how your local government works, roads, transportation,” et cetera. “You don’t have to rely on algorithms showing you this information,” Hundley said, hoping that his outlets can help “to get people out of that social media way of getting news.”
As this report was being written, Hundley shared the news that he was launching another site, News In the Grove, as a direct response to the declines in local reporting he says he saw around him. As the area newspapers (the Hillsboro News-Times and the Forest Grove News-Times) were merged, Hundley says, “extremely little was being published” about the smaller community of Forest Grove, including a house fire in which someone died, and he increasingly heard from civic leaders and community members that the News-Times “just doesn’t show up for things anymore.” Hundley said he felt that “It just seems like they’re not covering the community in a community-centric way,” which prompted him to launch News In the Grove. “With the sale [of the former local paper] I do believe there’s a market for it,” Hundley told us, though he wasn’t sure how long that might take. “It’s going to grow as the community supports it.”
Another intriguing hyper-local start-up is Newsberg, which was founded in 2023 by University of Oregon journalism graduate Branden Andersen. After interning as an undergrad, Andersen briefly worked as a beat reporter at the Bend Bulletin before being laid off. He moved to a sales and marketing position with the beer industry—a move, Andersen says, that taught him valuable business skills. He moved to Newberg in 2021, just months before four members of the Newberg School Board directed the superintendent to remove Black Lives Matter displays and LGBTQ+ pride flags from Newberg Schools. Andersen says he saw how, amidst a controversy that drew national attention, bloggers and social media commentary sowed division in his new community while the local legacy newspaper struggled, with its single reporter, to report local news. Later, when a neighborhood coffee shop closed under mysterious circumstances, Andersen decided to “put news back on the docket.” The coffee shop story was Newsberg’s first.
Since then, Andersen recently told readers, “From humble beginnings with seven subscribers in April 2023, Newsberg has grown into a trusted local news source with 1,400 newsletter subscribers and 168 stories published in 2024—an average of 3.23 stories per week.” Andersen takes pride in listening to community members to guide his coverage, including through a reader survey, which “helps me know that I’m moving in the right direction for what the readers actually want, not what I think they want.” “My whole thing,” Andersen told us, is “to answer the community’s questions. My boss is one collective community.” At first, he says, people were wary of somebody new in town asking questions. But over time he’s won trust. Recently, he says, when a potential story was percolating on a community social media site, someone said “’I bet Newsberg is on it,’ and that was when I knew this was working.”
Andersen’s vision is, ultimately, not just for Newsberg and his local community, but to encourage community journalism around the state. In college, he says, he and his fellow journalism students aimed to “meet at The New York Times.” But now, his goal is to help other journalists know “there are other pathways, and it could be just making a difference for 26,000 ppl.” Andersen is working with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and LION Publishers to develop a playbook and digital trainings for journalists wanting to learn the pillars of building a community news business. He hopes others will see Newsberg as a testing ground for ways to start a sustainable digital platform. And, he says, “I hope Oregon continues to embrace the pioneer spirit by doing things differently.”
Just like there are questions about how well larger, better-funded start-ups like the Oregon Journalism Project or Lookout Eugene-Springfield can fill local news gaps, there are questions about the economic prospects for small start-ups. And it’s important to note that not all new local digital start-ups are primarily journalistic: Some are opinion and partisan sites as much or more than providers of journalism.
National trends suggest that digital start-ups, which represent nearly 85% of local news start-ups nationwide, can face sustainability challenges similar to those of traditional newsrooms. Nevertheless, many of Oregon’s hyper-local start-ups are seeing promising signs of success. From her vantage point as the former executive director of FORJournalism (FORJ), Jody Lawrence-Turner told us, “I think determined journalists with a good sustainability plan can find the resources to start digital publications in news deserts.” This sentiment was echoed by others we spoke with, including Quinton Smith of Lincoln Chronicle, who told us, “In this community there’s a big enough thirst for local professionally produced reporting” to support the expansion they are undergoing. “In news deserts, if you do it they will come, to a certain extent. Our little model is being successful at that.” Nodding to another successful digital start-up, Ashland News, Smith said, “Communities like Ashland and Yachats are fertile field for this kind of endeavor.”
But “what happens in the fields that aren’t so fertile?” Here he pointed to the community of St. Helens, whose local paper (the Columbia County Chronicle & Chief, formed in December 2023 by the merger of The Chronicle in St. Helens and The Chief in Clatskanie) closed in 2024—even though the city is the county seat. Other than an occasional high-profile story, like the school sexual abuse scandal that rocked the community in 2024, “no one’s going to go out there to cover the community on a regular basis.” What local residents have to rely on in communities like these, said Smith, is “the Oregonian dropping in to cover stuff or some TV reporter [from another city] showing up.”
Additional New and Evolving Local News Initiatives
FORJournalism (FORJ). In our 2022 report, we highlighted the work of FORJournalism (formerly called the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism). Originally underwritten by EO Media, FORJ is a nonprofit led by media professionals “created to stem the tide of the decline of journalism in Oregon by connecting vulnerable publications with opportunities such as trainings, technology, tools, and grants to keep newsroom doors open.”
FORJ now operates three programs: the FORJ Resource Center, designed to help newsrooms adapt to be more sustainable in today’s media environment; Future Journalists of America, offering hands-on trainings and learning opportunities for high school students on both the business side and the community engagement side of local journalism; and the Journalism Lab, which brings professional journalists together to report on specific issues in stories to be shared across Oregon news outlets.
FORJ has thus evolved to become a news provider as well as a support organization. For example, the “Homelessness: Real Stories, Real Solutions” project, funded by the Central Oregon Health Council, examines the problem of homelessness in Central Oregon through both skilled journalism and deliberate community outreach. The project includes a “pre-test” survey to gauge Central Oregonians’ baseline understanding of homelessness, to be followed by a post-test designed to help discover how dedicated reporting on the issue might move the needle. As FORJ’s former executive director Jody Lawrence-Turner told us, they wanted to “invite readers to go on this journey with us: Who are the homeless and what are they facing?” According to Lawrence-Turner, this kind of specialized, thematic reporting is an important addition to Oregon’s news ecosystem that “can really reverberate, like ripples in the water. The information can really spread.”
The Catalyst Journalism Project. Based in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism & Communication, the Catalyst Journalism Project formed in 2017 to provide students with real-world experience in producing public affairs journalism. Catalyst focuses on showing how two reporting approaches — investigative journalism and solutions-focused journalism — can align to produce stories with impact. In 2023, Catalyst launched its Local News Initiative, supporting student journalists to fill gaps in the local public affairs coverage. According to its website, Catalyst is the first university-based newsroom of its kind in the Pacific Northwest and the only one nationwide dedicated to an investigative/solutions focus. Directed by faculty editors, “Catalyst student reporters produce multimedia stories developed in the Catalyst newsroom or directly with news outlets around the state.” In all, according to Catalyst director Brent Walth, nearly 100 journalism students have gained first-hand reporting experience while contributing to local news production in Oregon.
The Oregon Media Collaborative. Another new model for supporting local news is the Oregon Media Collaborative, a group of journalists, local news supporters, and media scholars from across the state committed to meeting Oregonians’ news and informational needs. Facilitated by the University of Oregon’s Agora Journalism Center, as of this writing the group included 78 members from organizations and outlets ranging from large legacy newsrooms and broadcasters (e.g. The Oregonian, KGW, and Oregon Public Broadcasting) to smaller outlets (e.g. Ashland.News, the Corvallis Advocate, the Highway 58 Herald, and the Tillamook County Pioneer) and specialized publications (e.g. the Lund Report, Street Roots). The Collaborative’s aims include building a stronger sense of community among Oregon’s many journalists; facilitating collective problem solving to address operational, technical, and digital transition challenges; and sharing resources and expertise. Early efforts included building a collaborative newsroom response to proposed legislation designed to bolster local news in Oregon.
Says Agora Journalism Center director Andrew DeVigal, at a time when “people are getting their news from a variety of different sources and civic information is being created and distributed across a variety of newspapers, newsletters, broadcast, podcasts, social media, et cetera,” a collaboration that engages local news providers across the state and across multiple types of media is “an opportunity to learn from each other and collectively improve the local news ecosystem.” Bringing journalism students into the conversation is another unique feature of OMC: DeVigal, a professor of practice at the UO’s School of Journalism & Communication, is connecting students with journalists and communities around the state to hone the practice of community-centered journalism.
Oregon’s Shifting Patchwork of Local News Providers
Overall, our sense is that there is greater recognition of the local news crisis and greater energy and effort across the state, compared to the situation we documented in our 2022 report, to address the resource challenges of local newsrooms. As our overview above indicates, an array of new outlets are trying to meet community news and information needs in innovative ways. The emergence of new newsrooms, projects, partnerships, and collaborations from hyper-local to regional to statewide points in promising directions.
These new efforts complement the ongoing work of legacy news. The anchoring presence of large and comparatively stable and better-resourced organizations, such as the Oregonian, Jefferson Public Radio, and Oregon Public Broadcasting, is an important feature of Oregon’s local news ecosystem.
The Oregonian has long been Oregon’s largest newspaper and is the oldest continuously-published newspaper on the West Coast. According to its editor and vice president of content, Therese Bottomly, after three consecutive downsizings before she took on the role, the paper and its parent company, Advance Media, are now “on solid footing and continuing to innovate.” From managing the features content on Here Is Oregon and maintaining content sharing partnerships with multiple other news organizations, to producing over two dozen newsletters and managing multiple social media accounts, to producing a popular true crime podcast and stories for Tik Tok, Bottomly says she “feels good” that the Oregonian’s online readership is now “really robust,” and “we’ve gotten enough initiatives, subscriptions, et cetera that we can now think strategically.” The paper has “tried to build partnerships that work for all parties,” such as with Underscore Native News, that ultimately benefit the whole local news ecosystem, Bottomly says.
For its part, according to CEO Rachel Smolkin, Oregon Public Broadcasting wants to “remain a hub for supporting local journalism around the state and region.” Smolkin, a former senior vice president at CNN who came to Oregon in 2024 to lead OPB, told us she has been “struck by the desire in so many communities to come together and have a shared discussion, to hear from different viewpoints, and experience moments of joy that bring us closer to others.” Noting that the local news ecosystem is “fragile,” Smolkin sees OPB as a “convener that brings people together.” With its “robust” digital presence, Smolkin says she envisions OPB “leading the news and public affairs conversation across Oregon and the Pacific Northwest – in partnership with community storytellers.” She points to the Northwest News Network and to OPB’s editorial partnerships with other news outlets across the region as a key contribution to Oregon’s news ecosystem. OPB has also opened bureaus in Bend and Pendleton, with potential plans for more bureaus around the state.
Overall, the launch of new local news outlets large and small, along with the persistence, stability, and growth of anchor institutions, point toward an optimistic perspective: Oregon’s news and information ecosystem, while undergoing significant disruption, is adapting and evolving in ways that can continue to serve the public. From this perspective, bolstered by the continued strength of key anchor institutions and the growth of a variety of partnerships and collaborations, the emergence of an array of innovative start-ups offers potential new models for how to serve communities’ information needs in an increasingly tough business and media environment.
The current reality, however, is that Oregonians’ news and information needs are being unevenly met. In some areas of the state, a variety of media—some new, some legacy; some struggling, some stable—overlap to provide relatively robust local coverage. In other areas, people struggle to find relevant, quality local news. While the launch of new news endeavors is heartening, it is important to note that the number of new outlets to open since our first report in 2022 appears to be fewer than the 18 outlets from our 2022 database that are no longer active (not to mention the looming possibility of additional mergers and closures), raising the question of what it will take to stimulate more robust local news growth in Oregon. We turn in the next section to what Oregon’s journalists say they will need for local newsrooms to survive and thrive.