Communities around the country have been losing local news outlets for over two decades. The current estimated rate of local newspaper closures is over two per week. As we discussed in our 2022 report, Assessing Oregon’s Local News & Information Ecosystem 2022, these losses have been caused by a perfect storm set in motion by the rise of digital media and the loss of traditional advertising—forces accelerated by the rapid “platformization” of news and information. As one recent review describes it:
Once consumers could access news and information from anywhere at any time, the market position of local media was greatly affected, with devastating impacts on local newspapers in particular. No longer were local news organizations the dominant way for consumers to get information about their community, and no longer were they the main vehicle through which local advertisers could reach their customers.
Today, most local outlets are now deeply dependent on digital platforms like Facebook and Google to reach audiences, even as those same platforms have siphoned off available advertising dollars—the main revenue stream for traditional for-profit journalism. As political scientist Joshua Darr puts it, “Print ads traditionally made up around 80 percent of newspaper revenues until platforms like Craigslist gutted classified ads, digital ads replaced printed ones at much lower profit margins, and Facebook and Google started scooping up 70 percent of those smaller revenues.”
Meanwhile, many people now get their news via Google, social media, and other online platforms, which further saps the vitality of local news organizations. For example, when online consumers do not “click through” to a story produced by a news outlet, but instead just read a headline or view an image posted on social media, the outlet that produced that content loses out on digital advertising revenue. Google and other platforms can “scrape” local news content to make it available to online audiences without compensating the outlets that produced that content. Yet most news organizations today are to some extent dependent on digital media platforms to reach audiences. And, as the editor and vice president of content for The Oregonian, Therese Bottomly, points out, local news outlets are also often at the mercy of these platforms’ opaque algorithms that determine how news stories and search results display for individual users. “Every media outlet in America is beholden to Google and Facebook,” Bottomly told us, “whether they are smiling on your content at any one time or not.”
In other words, local news outlets have been destabilized both by the loss of advertising, with the bulk of ad budgets now going to platforms like Google and Meta, and by the way those platforms draw audiences away into other online content while algorithmically altering how readily local news appears in peoples’ web searches and social media feeds.
This precarious environment has led to financially struggling local news outlets being rapidly bought up by large media conglomerates, especially hedge funds and private equity firms, which are now estimated to control half of all newspaper circulation in the U.S. These firms typically slash newsroom staff and budgets. In the most extreme scenarios, what’s left after the cuts are “ghost newspapers”: The remaining shell of gutted local papers “existing in name only and failing to produce much original reporting,” as one analyst describes it. (Oregon has been fortunate to lose only a few news outlets to these “investment” owners, thus far, though as we discuss further below, three dozen Oregon newspapers were sold to an out of state conglomerate in 2024, and the impact on local news in Oregon remains to be seen.)
Moreover, when local newspapers close, they are sometimes replaced by social media sites and Facebook groups to “cover” the community. While social media groups can be an important component of local civic vitality, sourcing and vetting of information on these sites is much looser. Although these sites can provide an important way for communities to stay connected, the distinction on such sites between fact-checked reporting and simply reposting unvetted information can be lost.
Research shows that robust quality local news and information can improve the lives of communities (see our 2022 report for an overview). Its absence, on the other hand, weakens communities. The spread of mis- and disinformation and growing political polarization, for example, have been linked to declining public engagement with declining supplies of local news.As Steven Waldman, president and founder of Rebuild Local News, puts it, local news is critical not only for increasing government accountability, but for building community cohesion:
Obituaries, high school sports, school board meetings, the new economic development plan, the amateur theater production, a couple’s 50th wedding anniversary — these types of stories teach neighbors about each other, provide basic information on communities and create a sense of shared interest.
Cohesion and community connection matter in both big, complex and diverse urban centers and in smaller and more rural communities, where local news outlets have shrunk or disappeared the most dramatically. In fact, by one count, 93% of US counties that lack a local news outlet are low-population areas.
Here in Oregon, the publisher of Lebanon Local and the Sweet Home-based New Era recently made an impassioned case for the importance of local news. Writing in early January 2025, Scott Swanson described how he and his wife decided to take over publication of their local paper eight years earlier when the former Lebanon Express fell on hard times, and how, after selling the paper in 2023, they’ve decided once again to try to save their local paper rather than see it go under.
“This hasn’t happened in a vacuum,” Swanson wrote. “In this business we’ve sustained the proverbial ‘thousand cuts’ over the last 30 years. Put bluntly, just about every possible thing that could go wrong has in the newspaper business.” But local papers matter, Swanson said, because they provide an irreplaceable local historical record. “Without a local newspaper, a hundred years – or even a decade – from now,” Swanson asked, “will your descendants be able to find quotes from residents, details from meetings, and factual information about anything, really, from social media platforms that may no longer even exist in the future?” Local media also provide a direct line to citizens, audiences, and consumers. “Despite the competition from social media,” says Swanson, “community newspapers continue to provide a very affordable option for businesses seeking to promote themselves to local people, who are the most likely to become loyal customers. Social media might get eyeballs across the world, but it doesn’t always produce local foot traffic for a brick-and-mortar business.”
Overall, the local news ecosystem nationwide and here in Oregon is changing rapidly in ways that endanger communities’ access to reliable, locally relevant news and civic information. Since our first assessment came out in late 2022, the challenges for local news organizations have intensified. Oregon has seen further losses of newspapers, more mergers, more budget cuts and layoffs in newsrooms, and most dramatically, a significant loss of locally owned newspapers. Interviews with over a dozen journalists, editors, newsroom leaders around Oregon revealed strong agreement that Oregon’s local news ecosystem is facing a crisis. When asked for his sense of the health of local news in Oregon, Greg Retsinas, president and general manager of KGW News in Portland told us, “It’s not dead but it’s not in good health. It feels not very well supported because we’re all fighting over a small pie of advertisers and audiences. We have smart owners and smart companies” Retsinas said, “but it’s a tough business to be in.” Therese Bottomly, executive editor of The Oregonian told us, the qualitative decline in local news around the state is “undeniable.” And, she said, “Consolidation of local media is not good for the ecosystem.”
Overall, Oregon’s local news is shrinking in three ways:
- Closures: An ongoing decline in the number of local news outlets;
- Sales to out-of-state conglomerate owners;
- Declining production of truly local news, due to closures, cuts in reporting jobs, and to the ongoing loss of audiences and revenues which have left many remaining outlets without the resources needed to adequately cover their communities.
Oregon Newspaper Stats at a Glance
Newspaper Closures around Oregon since 2022
Our updated map of outlets in Oregon that are regularly producing original local public affairs news (see below) indicates that 18 news outlets have closed or gone out of business since our first report. These include:
- The Medford Mail Tribune, which had served Jackson County and adjacent areas of Josephine County and northern California, ceased operations in January of 2023. The first Oregon paper to win a Pulitzer Prize (in 1934, for public service in its coverage of a local political insurgency), the Tribune was at the time it closed the state’s 5th-largest newspaper.
- The Columbia Press, based in Warrenton, stopped publishing a print edition just as our report went to print in November of 2022, though it still has a Facebook page featuring news and announcements about local events.
- The Columbia County Chronicle & Chief, based in St. Helens, Oregon, which had itself been formed by the merger of The Chronicle in St. Helens and The Chief in Clatskanie under the ownership of Country Media, ceased publication in the fall of 2024. “Combining the two newspapers into one was a last-ditch effort to reduce expenses and reestablish profitability,” company president Steve Hungerford said in a statement. “Sadly, that wasn’t successful.”
- In Portland, the hyperlocal newsletter Bridgeliner, founded in 2018, closed and encouraged its readers to migrate to the new site Axios Portland. As Bridgeliner explained to its readers in June of 2024: “This newsletter is a small business and although it has been run by some passionate and award-winning individuals, the climate for supporting local businesses like ours became challenging. We are very reliant on local advertising and community support, and this has been increasingly demanding in the last couple of years.”
It’s important to note that, as we highlight in the next section, new outlets are launching around Oregon, offsetting some loss of local news and offering potential models for how local news can be sustainably produced in the future. Journalists, former journalists, and civic-minded p eople around Oregon are stepping up to fill news and information gaps in their communities by starting hyper-local news outlets, often nonprofit and/or digital-only. As we explore further below, these small operations tightly focused on local communities, many of them non-profits, show promise of gaining sustainable local support and cultivating trust. Still, overall, Oregon has seen a net loss in local outlets since 2022—and a pronounced loss of locally-owned outlets.
Sales of Oregon Newspapers to Out-of-State Owners
In June of 2024, Portland-based Pamplin Media announced it had sold the Portland Tribune and its 23 other newspapers to a Mississippi-based publisher, Carpenter Media Group. Announcing the sale, Pamplin Media Group President J. Brian Monihan thanked the Pamplin family, noting that “Without their support, many communities would have lost their local newspaper years ago.”
The same week, local newspaper company EO Media Group, family-owned holder of a dozen newspapers around the state including the Bend Bulletin and the Baker City Herald, announced it would “scale back publication of several papers in July, lay off 28 staffers and seek a new owner with more resources.” The company had only recently expanded into the Medford area, starting the Rogue Valley Times to fill the gap left by the closure of the Medford Mail Tribune. As Seattle Times media editor Brier Dudley observed that week, “EO’s announcement is jolting because the group was an exemplar, run carefully by the journalism-minded Forrester family for decades, and a leader in efforts to save remaining local newspapers.”
Then, in October of 2024, Carpenter also bought EO Media, comprised of a dozen papers. EO Media’s vice president Kathryn Brown told staff, “It’s not that we don’t believe in the importance of local journalism, especially in rural communities — that remains our core value. It’s just that we have come to understand that due to the size of the company and so many other factors beyond our control, we are not in a situation that is financially sustainable.” With these sales to Carpenter Media, nearly 30% of Oregon’s newspapers were transferred to out of state ownership in one year, and Carpenter now owns nearly a third of Oregon’s newspapers, more than any other company, becoming one of the biggest employers of journalists in Oregon.
Who Owns Local News in Oregon?
It’s important to note that small, privately held newspapers do still exist in Oregon. But family-owned newspapers now make up only about 15% of Oregon’s newspaper ecosystem, according to our data, and of all Oregon’s media outlets, only 26, by our count, are single-holdings. Meanwhile, with the sale of three dozen newspapers to Carpenter on top of other newspapers that were already owned by GateHouse Media and other out-of-state owners, 42% of Oregon’s remaining newspapers are now owned by non-Oregon based owners.
Locally owned newspaper groups still exist as well. The largest is Salem-based Country Media, which acquired three weekly newspapers, the Newport News-Times, Cottage Grove Sentinel and Siuslaw News, from Illinois-based News Media Corporation in 2023, giving Country Media a total of 12 Oregon newspapers. But since 2022 several Country Media-owned papers have closed, combined with another paper, or reduced their frequency of publication.
The precise impacts of the recent changes in Oregon’s media ownership are still difficult to predict. Layoffs have already occurred at some Carpenter papers (following layoffs that EO Media had already announced), including at the Bend Bulletin, and at least one paper, the Sherwood Gazette, has been closed and its online presence combined into a shared site with another Carpenter-owned paper, the Valley Times. But it’s important to note that the financial future of the newspapers Carpenter purchased was uncertain. As Monihan and Brown both alluded to in their comments, it’s not clear whether the EO Media and Pamplin newspapers would have survived long-term without being acquired by a larger company, given the economic challenges they were facing. John Carr, senior vice president of Carpenter Media Group’s Oregon division, told us, “Some newspapers we acquire are in financial distress long before we arrive. Unfortunately, in those cases many of those newspapers are unable to maintain profitability or pay their bills,” meaning that “some difficult decisions, such as layoffs, may be necessary to stabilize the business.” As longtime Oregon journalist and Oregon Digital Content Editor for Carpenter Media Group Jody Lawrence-Turner put it to us, “From one perspective, if Carpenter hadn’t come in, what would have happened to those local papers?”
Nor is it yet clear if the sales to Carpenter will significantly alter the quantity and quality of local news those papers produce, compared to what they were producing before being sold. As former Pamplin executive editor John Schrag told us, “Over the past decade, a lot of media owners including local owners were very quietly reducing the size of their staff and the extent of their local coverage.” Others point out that if Carpenter Media decides to retain rather than let go the editors who, in many cases, are deeply rooted in their communities, the disruption may not be as severe. “Are they going to have the people who know the community covering the community?” asks University of Oregon journalism professor and long-time Oregon journalist Brent Walth.
When we asked how Carpenter will plan to operate the papers it has acquired, Carr responded, “CMG’s approach to operating community media focuses on long-term sustainability, not short-term profits” and that the company prioritizes “reinvesting available resources into the organization.” When asked about concerns that conglomerate ownership might drive down the amount and quality of local news, Carr said, “Rather than reducing local news coverage,” said Carr, “our approach to coaching, training and supporting local newsrooms, coupled with the hard work of dedicated reporters and editors in each newsroom, prevents newspapers from closing altogether, ensuring that communities continue to have access to quality local journalism.”
On the other hand, according to the Oregonian’s Therese Bottomly, “the voracious consumption of small entities by conglomerates is not good for the ecosystem.” Heidi Wright, former Chief Operating Officer for EO Media and current president of the organization FORJournalism, told us, “the loss of family-owned newspapers is especially significant. More than anything in the last year, we’ve lost that sense of community.” Chas Hundley, owner-operator of the hyper-local sites Banks Post and the Gales Creek Journal, put it more starkly: “2024 was a bloodbath — the grimmest year of Oregon journalism in a series of grim years.” However one feels about the loss of local ownership.
Whatever the long-term impacts, there is little doubt that the past several years have seen a significant shift in Oregon’s news ecosystem, with, in addition to significant ownership changes, nearly 20 local news outlets closing or merging with other outlets since late 2022. That means that in addition to heavy losses prior to 2022, another 13% of Oregon’s newspapers closed since late 2022.
Declining Production of Original Local News
Many local legacy newspapers are facing steep odds as they try to stay in business and keep providing local news to their communities, and cost-cutting has been rampant. As discussed above, the rise of digital platforms, while not the only cause, is a significant factor that has cost newspapers advertising and introduced a new middleman between news producers and audiences—a middleman that can manipulate how easily local news reaches audiences while extracting value from links to local news content. Shrinking revenues have left many newsrooms struggling to produce quality local news. Among Oregon’s journalists, stories abound of reporters working overtime to cover large geographic regions or dense, diverse cities with fewer and fewer resources; of junior reporters not long out of journalism school being made editors of resource-strapped outlets; and of newsrooms run by a single person with little capacity to do accountability reporting while local crises and corruption scandals unfold.
For example, Tim Trainor, editor at the Redmond Spokesman, is the sole staffer at a newsroom that used to employ 15 to 18 people. Trainor told us, “We are not meeting the community’s needs for sure, with just one person.” When asked what stories go uncovered by a one-person newsroom, Trainor said,
I only have time for cops. If there’s a murder in town, I cover it. There’s no beat reporter to suss out scandals and more complex stories. I have to do more re-writing of press releases—I have to fill the paper somehow. So if I have time for two stories per week, it will be cops or public safety.
John Schrag, long-time Oregon journalist and founder of Uplift Local (discussed further below), told us that at the current rate of losses, “In 20 years, there won’t be any rural journalists in Oregon—or at least none with the capacity and appetite to work on investigative journalism. The current model won’t give them to time and space to the do the kind of ambitious journalism that they used to do.”
As these observations illustrate, for an increasing number of legacy newspapers, producing less and less original local content—especially public affairs content that citizens need to make informed civic decisions—can seem like the most viable way, perhaps the only way, to stay in business.
As we perused Oregon’s local news sites to prepare this report, we were struck by several ways in which local news content often seemed thin. At many local news sites, we noticed less hard news or civic information than one might expect. Some appeared to feature little news at all beyond local sports, while the colonization of many sites by advertising made the actual news stories on some sites literally hard to see. Many sites carry content shared across the parent company’s various holdings that is therefore less locally specific. All in all, it appears that the amount of originally produced content on some local news sites is less than the “curated” coverage drawn from other news producers. (A recent study of local news in Montana found only 48% of that state’s local news outlets are predominantly news creators, rather than curators.)
When trying to assess the health of local news ecosystems, the number of shuttered and merged news outlets can be counted. What is more difficult to measure is this decline in actual original local news reporting, and its quality. One study that analyzed the content of news outlets in 100 randomly-selected communities found that “fewer than half of news stories provided to a typical community were produced by the local media outlet, and only 17 percent were about the community or events that took place there”—diminishing the very notion of “local” news.
The problem is complex, however. One reason local news sites may not seem very “local” is because they run content produced by other news outlets explicitly designed for that purpose. Content sharing is increasingly common across Oregon given the work of two non-profit newsrooms in particular, Oregon Capital Chronicle (OCC) and, more recently, the Oregon Journalism Project (discussed further below). It’s a welcome development in an increasingly strapped industry, allowing local outlets to continue offering quality news coverage even when, individually, they have fewer resources to produce it themselves. Chas Hundley, owner-operator of several small hyper-local Oregon news sites, told us that OCC “is really important for frequent state level updates I can republish. Pretty much every newspaper in Oregon is using them,” Hundley said, and he predicts that soon “virtually everyone will also use Oregon Journalism Project” too. Content sharing doesn’t only benefit small outlets. As The Oregonian’s Therese Bottomly told us, content sharing arrangements allow The Oregonian to feature more good quality journalism, including stories the paper would not be able to cover on its own, and saves already hard-pressed reporters from burnout.
On the other hand, she said, “You want it to be part of the mix. You don’t want it to be the mix.” Indeed, the increased use of shared content may reduce the sense of the news outlet as a local institution, and may contribute to one of the public’s biggest complaints about local news: About half of respondents in national surveys say their local news doesn’t actually reflect their local communities, particularly in rural areas.
All in all, the decline in local news in Oregon should be thought of not only in terms of closures, sales, and mergers of outlets, but also the increasingly thin product provided by many that remain. This sense was echoed by the local journalists we spoke with. Quinton Smith of the Lincoln Chronicle said there is a “huge range in the quality of the work across different kinds of outlets,” and that “people in rural communities have to work harder” to find relevant news. As reporter Ryan Haas of OPB put it, “it’s clearly worse now than two years ago.” In 2022, “We might have used the phrase ‘inflection point’” to describe the state of local news in Oregon, Haas said, “but now it’s a cliff.”
Amid Changing Media Habits, the Enduring Importance of Local News
These examples illustrate a complex problem: As the economics of running a local news business have become more challenging, resources are declining at many local news outlets due in part to the public’s changing media habits. Shrinking audiences for local news are both a cause and a consequence of that economic challenge, as audiences feel less well-served by “local news” that doesn’t cover local public affairs and doesn’t seem to reflect the local community – a downward spiral that is difficult to reverse. (This difficulty is compounded by public perceptions that local news outlets are doing well financially, likely leaving people less motivated to pay for local news).
And yet, as the Pew Research Center recently reported, “most U.S. adults (85%) believe local news outlets are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community, including 44% who say they are extremely or very important.” And “around two-thirds of Americans who feel very attached to their communities (66%) see local news outlets as extremely or very important.”
This felt connection between local news and civic belonging echoes a growing body of research showing how the availability and quality of local news affects the quality of civic life—and our ability to grapple with shared problems. (See our 2022 report for a fuller review of that research). For example, one study published in 2023 showed that local news is more effective at communicating about climate change, compared with national news, because it focuses on local impacts and is more trusted across party lines. Another interview-based study of rural Caroline County, Virginia showed that when the local newspaper, the Caroline Progress, closed at age 99, local residents reported negative impacts, “noting increased isolation and diminished pride in their community.”
The enduring importance of local news and information butts up against the hard reality of declining capacity for production of local news. In the next section, we examine the outlets that remain—some thriving, many struggling, some just getting started—around the state.