In this report, we update the data we presented in our 2022 Oregon News & Information Ecosystem report. We re-examined every entry in the database we assembled in 2022 to, as accurately as possible, represent all newspapers, digital-only news sites, public radio stations, and television stations in Oregon that regularly carry local news.
Mapping local news ecosystems is challenging because there is not necessarily an existing comprehensive master list of news outlets in any particular state until researchers create one. For example, the Secretary of State’s “Oregon Blue Book” provides a valuable starting place for identifying newspapers around the state, but it is not a complete list of all publications that carry civic news and information. The database and statistics presented in this report should therefore be treated as a good faith effort but possibly incomplete. We encourage readers to visit our interactive form to let us know about any outlet we may have overlooked.
To be included in our database, an outlet must have a website, both because it’s difficult to know about small print publications that have no online presence and therefore cannot easily be accessed outside of the community they are produced in, and also because, as a practical matter, most functioning news outlets today have—and need to have—a web presence. Our database is therefore inherently limited in that sense.
However, we didn’t include stand alone Facebook pages in our database. That’s a serious limitation at a time when Facebook groups are sometimes taking the place of newspapers that have closed, but identifying such groups systematically was beyond our capacity.
Another challenge to be noted is that, in this era of increasing consolidation in the news business, multiple individual news websites can be linked by a single underlying newsroom. We have counted websites with separate URLs and/or different daily content as separate “outlets” in our database, but readers should note that these may or may not correspond to different underlying bricks-and-mortar news outlets.
For this report, we thoroughly updated our 2022 database, checking each outlet for whether it still appeared to be operational and regularly producing originally, locally relevant civic information. (Our criteria for inclusion are spelled out in more detail here). We also updated ownership information for each outlet. Adjustments to the original 2022 database include:
- Removing outlets that have closed/ceased operations. We defined an outlet as “closed” and removed it from the data shown in this report if, as of January 2025, the website was no longer active or the original URL now redirects to a news site by another name (e.g. the former Dalles Chronicle URL now redirects to the site of the Columbia Gorge News), and/or if web searches for the site led to a differently-named news site. When possible, we also gathered news articles or other web materials describing news outlets closures.
- Removing outlets that have been merged such that they no longer appear online under their original name (e.g. the Newport News-Times now redirects to the Lincoln County Leader; the Sherwood Gazette now redirects to the Valley Times).
- Removing outlets that appear to have no website of their own for distributing news, but only a Facebook page.
- Removing outlets that, on closer examination, did not fit our criteria of a) regularly producing original civic affairs focused primarily on the state of Oregon or communities within it, and b) producing content with a generally journalistic approach (to distinguish from sites that deal primarily in interpretation and opinion). While these determinations can be somewhat difficult to make, we wanted to focus on documenting journalistic sources of news and information around the state.
- Readers should note that being removed from the database is not necessarily a comment on the quality of content produced by a particular outlet. For example, in our original database we included the Portland-based website The Immigrant Story, which produces multimedia stories of the immigrant experience in the United States; on reexamination, we concluded that the site does not consistently focus on Oregon or communities within it. We also removed a few outlets we had initially included which focus predominantly on travel, culture, and lifestyle if they appeared to produce little to no locally relevant civic affairs content. Again, this is not to suggest that such outlets aren’t important—they are. Communities benefit from many types of information, but at a time when public affairs reporting is particularly endangered by rapid changes in the digital news environment, we wanted to keep our focus on outlets that provide at least some civic/public affairs information.
- We also added any outlets we could identify that began operations since our database was first created in 2022, along with a small number of sites we had inadvertently overlooked in our first news mapping effort. (We thank readers who made us aware of a few omissions that we are happy to now rectify).
In addition, we updated our coding of “Medium.” Outlets were coded as “newspapers” if they were founded before the 2000s and/or their website describes the outlet as a “newspaper” and/or if they belong to a newspaper group or chain and/or the outlet publishes regularly in print. “Digital” outlets are those that were founded since the 2000s and/or are not explicitly described as a “newspaper” on their website (common descriptors for this category are “newsroom” or “news organization”, sometimes with the term “digital”) and/or do not appear to predominantly publish in print; this includes a few cases of legacy newspapers that have stopped publishing in print altogether. The “Digital” category thus includes primarily “digital first” publications, but also a few “digital only” publications that used to be traditional newspapers. Some of these coding judgments may be subjective, and we welcome readers to let us know if our coding of any particular outlet seems incorrect. Readers should note that some organizations that today consider themselves multimedia outlets are still coded according to these categories in our database (e.g. Oregon Public Broadcasting, which we code as both a “Radio” [KOPB] and a “TV” [OPB] outlet).
Readers should also note that the main database excludes a small but important category of outlets that regularly produce original public affairs news about Oregon and other states in the Pacific Northwest: outlets like ProPublica Northwest, Investigate West, and the Columbia Basin Bulletin. While important to the overall news coverage of our state, these regional outlets are not physically housed in Oregon and do not report only on Oregon. We have included them on a separate tab of the database, but we have not included them in the statistical descriptions and analyses presented here.
It’s important to note that our findings differ slightly from those of the Medill School at Northwestern University, whose State of Local News reports are probably the most widely-cited research on local news around the country. The task of locating all functioning media outlets in any one locale can be challenging. While Medill’s research offers an excellent overview of the closure of local newspapers across the country and other trends in local news nationwide, it focuses mainly on newspapers and doesn’t necessarily account for other forms of local media such as public radio or digital first publications. Moreover, researchers gathering data nationally may sometimes miss local details.
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