Oregon newspapers have been hard-hit in recent years. But a surge of startups — most run as nonprofits — are popping up to keep communities informed.
During the 2020 Alameda Fire, while government agencies in Southern Oregon struggled to communicate with each other, members of the public needed to know who should evacuate and how.
Amid the chaos, residents of Phoenix and Central Point looked first to Facebook for official information, according to a 2022 University of Oregon study that found the Rogue River Valley to be one of the state’s worst news deserts. The Ashland Tidings had closed a year earlier, and Medford’s Mail Tribune, now shuttered, was vastly diminished from its days as a Pulitzer Prize-winning institution. At the time of the fire, Bert Etling, the laid-off former editor of the Tidings, was glued to his scanner. He tweeted updates based on what he heard — around 50 of them on the first day of the fire — and soon gained hundreds of new followers. This underscored to him a great hunger in his community for reliable information.
“There’s a growing need for useful public information to inform civic dialogue,” Etling says. “Acute situations like that really expose it, but it’s an ongoing thing.”
A year later, a group of concerned citizens tapped Etling to try again in Ashland with a new model for local news delivery. A few back-porch meetings sealed the creation of the nonprofit Ashland.news. Today the site — maintained by a three-and-a-half-person newsroom and a loyal band of contributors, volunteers and key funders — attracts 45,000 monthly readers. Surveys by UO’s journalism school find Ashland.news ranks high in reader trust.
Local media outlets like the Tidings and the Mail Tribune have been hard-hit by industry currents of the last 15 years. In just the last year, Robert Pamplin Jr.’s chain of newspapers — which grew rapidly in the 2000s — was sold to Carpenter Media Group, which announced layoffs shortly after. EO Media Group, which publishes the Bend Bulletin, sold to Carpenter a few months later. And those high-profile shifts reflect a decline in revenue and staffing at local media outlets that began in the early 2000s with the rise of online news and the post-9/11 recession and accelerated by the end of that decade with the subprime housing crisis.
But the decline in ad revenue and subscription dollars doesn’t reflect the public’s appetite for local news. In many communities, social media is replacing its printed and broadcast counterparts as a source for news. The Facebook group “What’s ‘REALLY’ Happening in La Pine” boasts 12,000 members, who log in to share information about missing pets, closed roads and more contentious local issues.
Though the rise of local Facebook groups presents its own set of challenges — both human and technological in nature — some companies are filling local news vacuums with tech alone. Some companies are experimenting with “hyperlocal” content backed by artificial intelligence. A national network of websites called Hoodline, which includes a Portland vertical, acknowledges using AI “to support and enhance our editorial processes.” This includes the use of “AI personas,” which a site disclaimer says are pen names reflecting the work of multiple parties.
More bizarrely, as OPB reported in December, the website for the Tidings has been slapping the bylines of real journalists who have never worked in Oregon onto fake, AI-generated stories.
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Since 2022, journalism professor Andrew DeVigal and his colleagues at the University of Oregon have conducted statewide news-need surveys that reveal deep and yawning deficiencies in communities around the state. And they found that despite high engagement on Facebook groups, community members want more. La Piners who participated in the study said they’d like to see coverage of youth issues, real estate development and the future of the Wickiup Reservoir area.
But there are reasons to be hopeful. Etling and Ashland.news aren’t the only fish swimming upstream in an increasingly challenging media climate.
Over the past five years, membership in the Institute for Nonprofit News nearly doubled to 474 outlets, including eight in Oregon.
In addition to the two-year-old Ashland.news, the state’s nonprofit news boom includes the Central Coast’s YachatsNews.com; in Oakridge, the Highway 58 Herald; in Jacksonville, the Applegater; and Newberg has Newsberg. Hood River’s Columbia Insight delivers environmental news, and Portland’s Underscore Native News covers tribes of the Pacific Northwest. (To be sure, Oregon’s media landscape features some experienced nonprofits not quite as old as OPB, including the 25-year-old street newspaper Street Roots and the 15-year-old health-news website The Lund Report.)
Another venture, heading for Lane County in 2025, has UO’s Damian Radcliffe and others in the field thoroughly excited. Renowned journalist and UO grad Ken Doctor plans to open the second newsroom of his startup Lookout Local in the Eugene-Springfield news desert and staff it with 20 people.
In August Willamette Week co-owner Mark Zusman announced the launch of the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit that will partner on investigative reporting projects with smaller newsrooms around the state. In 2019 WW, itself a for-profit company, launched a membership program that allows readers to donate to the paper at any level. Other for-profit outlets, including the Portland Mercury, have followed suit.
The emerging news landscape in Oregon features outlets more open about their political orientation, like right-of-center online newsletters Portland Dissent and Oregon Roundup. Bend business lawyer Jeff Eager started the Roundup as the Bend Business Roundup in 2017 to draw clients to his practice. The mission shifted as he noticed readers respond to stories where his natural conservatism shone through. Eager has eyes to run the Roundup as a true source of daily news. To that end, he recently incorporated as a nonprofit with a board featuring firebrand Oregon pol Betsy Johnson, who’s a fan of his work.
A legislator for two decades, Johnson tells OB that as legacy media declines, she’s gravitated more to the state’s “pirate press.” But Johnson once was an OPB believer, serving on its board of directors for around 15 years. Throughout her time in public life, which included a failed run for governor as an independent in 2022, Johnson says she grew disillusioned with OPB for its bias, sloppiness and predictability. “I wouldn’t give a dime to OPB at this point.”
She expects OPB’s donor base will fatigue as nonprofit news grows as a business model.
“The overall message I get out of this is people writ large are yearning for reliable press with integrity,” Johnson says.
In conversation, Etling still slips and calls Ashland.news “the paper.” He thinks a nice name might have been “The Daily Miracle,” a newspaper term alluding to the seeming impossibility of producing a daily print product despite immense challenges.
“We’re making it up as we go along,” Etling says. “I think it’s going to work out, but I don’t know exactly how.”
As a 30-year newspaper veteran, Etling’s never considered the business side of the news business his cup of tea. But he knows he needs to develop the taste. More than 1,200 people donated to Ashland.news last year. But only around 450 donors give monthly, and the organization believes 1,000 such sustainers are needed for long-term stability.
It’s one reason the Ashland.news team marched in last year’s Ashland Fourth of July parade — Etling at the front, banner in hand.
“Journalists never want to be part of the story,” he says. “But now we kind of have to be.”
Etling says some earlier nonprofit news leaders held the incorrect assumption that “if you build it, they will come,” and focused on developing quality journalism but not the donor base needed to keep the lights on. Nonprofit journalists today must market what they do so audiences know that if they want quality news, they have to pay for it.
In mid-November, Ashland.news sent a bulk mailer to every address in Ashland and Talent, 17,000 in all, dubbed its “first print edition” and containing useful local news articles, a holiday-events calendar and a call to donate in a year-end fundraiser. Ashland.news hopes to boost readership along with donations.
Last year Ashland.news profiled a woman attending the local university while living homeless in a tent. Reporter Holly Dillemuth’s coverage drew the support of an anonymous donor who paid for housing for the woman. Etling is proud of the coverage, but the journalism he says he’s most proud of is the “day-in, day-out stuff” — candidate Q&As, meeting recaps, writeups of the new water-treatment plant — i.e., the stuff of daily miracles.
With its university, world-renowned Shakespeare Festival and 21,000 residents, there’s a great need in Ashland. The decline of local news has left communities around Oregon lacking more than just award-worthy articles. Gone are the obits, local restaurant awards, youth-sports coverage and in-person candidate forums. Etling hears about it all the time.
Ashlanders are clear that they’re grateful. And they’re clear what they want.
“They want more.”
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