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What a devastating stretch for community journalism.
August brought the closure of two rural Lane County news sources: The Chronicle, after more than a century covering Springfield, Cottage Grove, Creswell and Pleasant Hill; and the Highway 58 Herald in Oakridge, which launched in 2021 when the Dead Mountain Echo closed after nearly 50 years.
This month, McClatchy — which owns 30 newspapers nationwide, including those in Tacoma, Olympia, Boise and Sacramento, announced the layoffs of nearly 100 of its journalists nationwide. USA Today, formerly Gannett, has conducted several waves of job cuts. Just last week, The Register-Guard laid off a longtime local journalist, shedding decades of community experience along the way.
More and more legacy media outlets in major cities are staffed by skeleton crews who do little more than rewrite press releases, because their owners disinvest in the newsrooms, while maintaining still-healthy profit margins. In addition, many remaining smaller, independently owned news outlets are facing closure because their traditional print-centric business model for news no longer works in an internet-, social media- and AI-driven age.
The hollowing out of the local news industry is hardly new. But it’s accelerating right in front of us. The multi-million-dollar question journalists and industry advocates want to know is: What can we do about it?
Lookout Eugene-Springfield’s early success shows a community’s power to push back. The financial support from more than 700 local individuals, families, businesses and foundations helped us ramp up to our current staff of 16 journalists, the most of any newsroom between Portland and Sacramento. While Lookout itself plans to expand, society needs broader solutions that can stanch the bleeding.
The good news is that Oregon’s legislators are now fully recognizing, and understanding, the depth and breadth of the issues. They are actively considering what to do in the 2027 Legislature and studying recent, positive state actions in California, Washington and New Mexico, among others.
In those states, elected lawmakers are pushing innovative policy solutions to support local newsrooms without having government agencies or themselves — among the prominent subjects of journalists’ coverage — having any direct say in who gets help. That key point is essential to all of us, and we’re vigilant about it.
California lawmakers in 2023 launched the California Local News Fellowship. Through the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, it has selected more than 100 early-career journalists to work in newsrooms across the state for two-year stints, where they earn full-time salaries and benefits, paid via the University of California with state funding.
The program has been so successful that it recently earned support from a private foundation to expand with health journalist and editor fellowships. Journalism programs at Washington State University and the University of New Mexico are overseeing similar programs with their own state support.
Now it’s time for our state, through a partnership with the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, to start putting young journalists in Oregon newsrooms. Lawmakers should make it a priority when they meet in January for the upcoming legislative session.
We’re also intrigued by a bill the California State Legislature just passed, which would establish a tax credit for news organizations based on the number of journalists they employ. Want a bigger tax break? Hire more journalists.
Local governments can make modest changes to support community news as well. Cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco require their agencies to dedicate portions of advertising budgets for health campaigns, public notices or job listings to local media outlets.
Advocating for government support of local journalism isn’t a position we take lightly. But the urgency of this moment calls for it. We must all support the vital role local news plays in a functioning democracy.
Right now, the next generation of independent news outlets are launching in Oregon communities like Newberg, Ashland and Forest Grove — as well as Lookout here in Lane County — where readers are supporting new alternatives to shrinking legacy outlets.
Which brings us to our final point about the business of the news. Local journalism is a community effort, and it requires community support. Readers must subscribe or donate to outlets whose reporting they value, not merely read it, appreciate it and move on.
Local businesses must dedicate some of their advertising dollars to these outlets, instead of Google or Meta. Individuals and businesses not only advance their own community knowledge and business, they reinvest in their hometowns.
If there’s any lesson to take from the string of bad news in local news, it’s this: If you value a local, independent press, you must support it.
