It’s sad that the Malheur Enterprise, a legendary newspaper in Eastern Oregon, is shutting down this month.
But there are some positive angles to the story.
The Enterprise demonstrated that local papers can still succeed with committed ownership and aggressive, quality journalism.
The weekly was profitable. Where it fell short was finding talent. Publisher Les Zaitz said he couldn’t find a qualified successor interested in moving to the rural area.
That highlights the additional challenge for rural papers but doesn’t disprove the approach. Zaitz said the model also works at the Salem Reporter, an online outlet he started in 2018.
“Why is it working? Because we’ve so relentlessly focused on quality local journalism and not just, you know, the latest restaurant offers,” he said. “I’m convinced. I mean, I’ve used this formula essentially in the poorest county in Oregon and I’m using it in the second largest city in Oregon. It all is rooted in the kind of journalism you deliver to the local audience.”
If you “don’t have good, strong content, nothing else you do matters,” he said in a phone interview.
Zaitz is a former Oregonian reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. He and his wife, Scotta Callister, bought the Enterprise in 2015 and turned it into a model for local journalism.
The paper won national awards for exposing local officials’ shenanigans and holding them to account. Journalism students traveled to remote Malheur County to learn from Zaitz and his crew.
In 2022, approaching their 70s, Zaitz and Callister tried to sell the paper but no acceptable buyer materialized.
They told readers on May 6 that they are retiring, though Zaitz will continue working temporarily at his family’s weekly in Keizer, near Salem, and running the Reporter.
The Enterprise printed its last edition May 7 and is closing this month after 115 years.
This is a loss for the county. Its other newspaper, a weekly in Ontario, is for sale and facing an uncertain future. But residents benefited from a decade of competition and strong reporting.
More than 3,000 papers closed since 2005 as a tornado of economic, technological and societal changes turned more than half of U.S. counties into news deserts. Malheur County may be next.
It’s also a loss for journalism in the Northwest. The Enterprise was an inspiration and a challenge to other papers, to be as fierce as the 3,000-circulation weekly out in Vale.
Zaitz and I also discussed ways to sustain local newspapers and his legacy at the Enterprise. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:
Q: Did you think this might happen when you tried selling the paper?
A: Well, no. I just think there’s been such a sea shift in the newspaper business in just the past couple of years. The pool of people who thought that running an independent, weekly newspaper was a good career choice, that dwindled rapidly in my judgment, number one. Number two, we don’t train people how to be business people. We train them how to write a lede and do fact-checking but we don’t tell them, you know, how to file a payroll report.
Q: How was the Enterprise doing financially?
A: Oh it was fine. This is not a financial decision. This is simply a life-choice decision. I’ll be 70 years old next month and this is what, my 52nd year in the profession, and I’ve always wanted to go out full-bore.
Q: What could turn things around? Will it take societal change, to appreciate local newspapers more?
A: The problem here is not appreciation for the newspaper because we are deeply appreciated in the community. We’ve done fundraising drives for public records (battles) and people are lined up to give money to help out. It’s an issue, again, of the trained people, successors, who can run a business. Because in the news business, print or digital or a magazine, you have to be a successful business first and then a successful journalist second.
Q: That is a problem.
A: As an industry we’ve not done a very good job, that I’m aware of, of putting publisher-training camps together, taking people who are maybe editors or work for a bigger paper and teach them how to run a business so they can go out and be independent entrepreneurs. That’s the issue with the Enterprise. If we found some young couple from Iowa that wanted to take on a nationally recognized paper, boy, I would have arranged a pretty easy transaction for them to get in.
Q: Were there other options?
A: Some people said, well, why don’t you just turn it over to the community. Well, nobody in the community knows how to run a news business and they don’t know about journalism, and that would require me spending a great deal of time in Malheur County training that successor. That was not an option.
Q: Some think turning papers over to nonprofits is the solution.
A: In smaller communities that is not an option. I mean these folks are having a hard time raising money to feed hungry kids and protect abused women. So the nonprofit model, in my mind, never was an option and I have philosophical differences. The problem is that you typically depend on one, two or three significant donors as your base and then hope they stay with you. Donors get new interests so that’s never felt like a very stable way to run a news organization.
Q: What about Oregon’s Senate Bill 686, which would require tech companies profiting from news to pay publishers or fund journalism grants?
A: I’m conflicted. I’m not very comfortable with using government authority to get money to sustain the industry. I just think that opens the door for strings to be attached in ways we may not understand. But on the other hand, anything we can do to help sustain access to independent, fact-based information is especially crucial in this country right now. So while I may have philosophical differences about the structure of that legislation, and how it is implemented and who gets what at the end of the day, does it do more or less to help serve the public interest? I judge that, on balance, it does more good than harm.
Q: I’m with you. Normally you might say no but it’s a crisis.
A: Yep. Look at all the different approaches people take to try and “solve the problem of failing journalism.” A lot of very smart people out there and a lot of big failures, so we haven’t found the answer yet.
Q: Meanwhile the industry is emaciated.
A: The other element is that because of the compression of the industry, you don’t have the machinery in place to train journalists. You have fewer and fewer editors, and editors who are there are usually active half-time as reporters, so who is training the next generation how to do the very fundamental work that we all do? People appreciate good, hard local journalism so the demand is there. I think across Oregon and across the country, one of the reasons we have such weak enterprises is people have been not diligent about delivering good, quality, local journalism.
Q: Perhaps that’s your legacy with the Enterprise: Showing that quality builds the audience. That’s not a model some chains are pursuing.
A: We always looked at the Enterprise as a journalism lab but I also hoped it would serve as a role model. You can do this with a small staff. You just have to be deliberate and very targeted in how you approach it. I think we’ve inspired a few folks around the country with “oh, yeah, we can do that,” which is a comforting feeling as I go out the door.
