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.
Research by Regina Lawrence
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.
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.