This 2025 report builds on our 2022 assessment, providing an updated snapshot of Oregon’s evolving local news landscape—highlighting challenges, emerging solutions, and key initiatives shaping the future of civic information in our state.
Featured Research
Advancing Community-Centered Journalism
A practical and provocative set of lessons and experiences for journalists who are new to the community-centered approach and those already practicing it. Damian interviews over a dozen leading thinkers and practitioners about how CCJ is implemented in various news organizations.
Engaged Journalism: Listening to Salem’s Hispanic Community
Professor DeVigal’s Engaged Journalism class conducted a study to survey Salem’s Hispanic community’s information needs and assets. This report aims to summarize the study findings and provide recommendations to address the gap in the existing information landscape.
Review more of our research that informs our work
Community Perspectives on Rogue Valley’s Information Ecosystem
Professor DeVigal’s Engaged Journalism class conducted a study to survey the Rogue Valley’s information ecosystem and its residents’ information needs and assets. This report aims to summarize the study findings and provide recommendations to address the gap in the existing information landscape.
Engaging Emergence: Advancing the Future of Journalism for All
Engaging Emergence (EE3) convened 120 journalists, community organizers, educators, researchers, and others interested in transforming journalism to be more inclusive, community-powered, and relevant to all.
Redefining News: A Manifesto for Community-Centered Journalism
This forward-thinking report makes the case for embracing a more inclusive, community-focused model of journalism, one that prioritizes listening to and collaborating with communities to produce relevant, equitable and impactful news and storytelling. The report features an actionable framework to put the principles of Community-Centered Journalism into practice and explains how this approach differs from traditional models of journalism, with potential benefits including rebuilding trust, tackling inequities, and fostering civic engagement.
Assessing Oregon’s Local News & Information Ecosystem 2022
This report represents one step toward assessing the state of local news in Oregon and what can be done to strengthen it. Counting and mapping Oregon’s local news producers will track further changes. And by looking at initiatives underway around the country, Oregon’s newsrooms, educators, funders, and policy-makers can consider emerging innovations to build the vitality of Oregon’s local news that mean communities’ information needs.
Shifting Practices for a Stronger Tomorrow: Local Journalism in the Pacific Northwest
Read how newsrooms are adapting to address the realities of the journalism industry in 2019. Their experiences, and the solutions they are deploying, are not unique to the Pacific Northwest. We hope that news organizations in the United States and beyond will benefit from these insights.
Building Engagement: A Report on Supporting the Practice of Relational Journalism
At a time when journalists are grappling with eroding trust in media and finding new ways to build connections with the communities they serve, we offer a concrete way of talking about and documenting relational engagement.
Putting Engagement to Work: How News Organizations are Pursuing “Public-Powered Journalism”
This report examines how newsrooms across the country are pursuing deeper audience engagement using the tools and methods provided by the company Hearken. Our goal is to examine how newsrooms are taking up the challenge to involve the public at every stage of the news production process.
The 32 Percent Project: How Citizens Define Trust and How Journalists Can Earn It
Researchers and journalists Lisa Heyamoto and Todd Milbourn hosted a series of community workshops in public libraries around the country to get a ground-level understanding of how trust operates in people’s personal lives, and identify strategies for producing more trustworthy journalism.
Local Journalism in the Pacific Northwest: Why It Matters, How It’s Evolving and Who Pays For It
This report explores how local newsrooms around the Pacific Northwest are grappling with the new opportunities and imperatives of engaging with audiences. Beyond new technological ways to tell compelling stories, Radcliffe’s report finds journalists learning to listen more deeply to their communities.