Compared to the situation in 2022 when we released our first Oregon News & Information Ecosystem assessment, the number of news outlets serving Oregon’s communities, and the number of locally owned outlets in particular, has declined significantly. Moreover, local news content varies widely in quantity and quality around the state, and finding relevant local news is getting harder for many Oregonians, particularly for those living in rural regions. The first take-away from this report, therefore, is that the local news crisis has sharply accelerated in Oregon.
Amidst these declines, there are also some promising new developments, including the launch of the for-profit, Lookout Eugene-Springfield and the non-profit statewide investigative Oregon Journalism Project, and the innovative approaches to providing civic information being launched by Uplift Local. And there are signs of success for some digital hyperlocal news start-ups as well, both for-profit and non-profit. Our second take-away is therefore that innovation and entrepreneurship are happening, pointing toward promising models for local newsrooms and making Oregon a laboratory for finding sustainable solutions.
Partnerships and collaborations are also growing to offset the increasingly limited resources of most local newsrooms, including the work of FORJ and the Oregon Media Collaborative to provide training and support, and content sharing partnerships fueled by non-profits including the Oregon Capital Chronicle and the Northwest News Network. Notably, collaborations are on the rise between non-profit and for-profit newsrooms, as are collaborations across newsrooms with non-profit and higher education organizations. These developments build on a solid foundation of relatively well-trusted local media in Oregon. As KGW’s Greg Retsinas observed, “the ethical state of our journalism [in Oregon] is good. You can trust the media you watch. Oregonians trust and like their media outlets.”
The picture, therefore, is not entirely negative, and Oregon’s entrepreneurial newsrooms are providing valuable models that point toward a brighter future. But these bright spots need to be considered against a backdrop of years of contractions in local news around the state that have accelerated since 2022. As one Oregon journalist put it, local news in Oregon is facing not an inflection point, but a cliff.
What will Oregon do next?
One response surely involves continued adaptation and innovation by local newsrooms. As the national organization Trusting News recently observed,
Today’s local news landscape is complicated and messy, and a lot of words are being written about the demoralizing nature of shrinking resources. That’s all true.
It’s also true that the local news ecosystem overall is diverse and interesting, full of experimentation, collaboration and a continued orientation toward public service.
With those realities in tension with each other, the public needs the news industry to invest in continued evolution and collaboration.
That evolution needed is not just in updated business practices and technological adaptation, but also an evolution in the craft of journalism itself. The local news crisis is connected to a larger crisis of the public’s declining trust in media and in virtually all other democratic institutions. Regaining the public’s trust—and earning the trust of whole communities who have long felt estranged from mainstream media—is a key to building sustainable newsrooms. That may require doing journalism differently, learning to be more relational and collaborative, learning to work with communities and to listen more closely and effectively to their stories. Particularly for smaller news outlets, it may mean adopting the mindset of journalists like Branden Andersen of Newsberg, who told us that earning the trust of the community is how he knows he’s doing what he set out to do. “My boss is one collective community,” says Andersen. It will also require “enriching the connections with the community, to ask what those communities need and establish pathways for them to participate,” says Agora Journalism Center director Andrew DeVigal. This evolution in practice will also require making newsrooms more inclusive. As John Schrag of Uplift Local told us, “Better listening and training are important, but until we have newsrooms that represent the communities we cover, there are going to be gaps.”
A second, critically necessary response is from philanthropy, the private sector, and news consumers. As John Palfrey, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, states, “For local news to be sustainable over the long term, communities will need to stand up and support their local news providers. We will need to invest in local news the same way that we invest in arts and culture, hospitals, or our alma maters.”
A final leg to support a durable evolution of local news is public policies that help news organizations build sustainable revenue streams, assist with the costs of investment in local reporting, and offset the devastating losses brought about by the platformization of news and information. Quality, trusted local news is a public good that is in increasingly short supply, and government can take action to stimulate demand, bolster supply, and stem further losses. States around the country are passing an array of media policies that deserve consideration and deliberation here in Oregon. The goal, as described in the 2022 Roadmap for Local News, should be to “ensure that civic information is a ubiquitous asset in every community…while maintaining editorial independence.”
We end on this important note: As the Roadmap’s language suggests, we believe the focus of efforts by journalists and newsrooms, by philanthropists and private donors, and by policymakers and advocates—and by community members more broadly—should be on making sure communities have access to “civic information,” broadly defined. Much of that information has historically been provided by legacy news media, particularly newspapers—the “keystone media” within traditional local news ecosystems. But in today’s rapidly changing media environment, legacy media are no longer the only important local news providers, and the goal should not simply be “saving” the traditional news business. Rather, the goal should be to support the ability of communities to access trustworthy and locally relevant civic information. This approach recognizes that “the fate of communities and the vitality of local news—whether delivered over the internet, the airwaves, or in print—are intrinsically linked.”
Moreover, the ultimate goal of policy efforts, we believe, should focus first and foremost on the informational health of Oregon’s communities. We agree here with Mike Rispoli, senior director for journalism and civic information at the organization Free Press, who recently asked,“What should we be building a bridge to? What is the actual thing that we want?” The ultimately goal of interventions in local news, Rispoli says, “should be more informed communities, more engaged communities, and — as a byproduct of that — supporting news and its production.”
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