One of Oregon’s most enduring and decorated weekly newspapers will print its last edition Wednesday and shut down completely at the end of the month.
The pending closure of the Malheur Enterprise in eastern Oregon marks the latest in a long succession of small papers that have shut down across the state over the past several years.
The Enterprise has been operating since 1909, but publisher Les Zaitz and his wife, former Enterprise publisher Scotta Callister, said they’re ready for retirement and couldn’t find a successor to take over the paper.
“There’s been a lot of talk about saving rural news operations – focused on funding, training programs, digital upgrades – but you still need someone to run them, someone with both a passion for community and an understanding of the news business,” Callister, 72, said in the Enterprise article announcing the paper’s closure. “That’s increasingly tough to find.”
She and Zaitz have owned the Enterprise since 2015, using their big-city journalism experience to inform their approach to community news in the small city of Vale. They recruited young reporters to learn the craft with them in Malheur County and worked with the national journalism nonprofit ProPublica on investigative projects.
Zaitz, 69, is the dean of Oregon journalism, having reported across the state over a career that spanned more than four decades. He worked for The Oregonian for 25 years in two separate stints, anchoring the paper’s investigation of the Rajneeshpuram spiritual community in the 1980s. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize – once for The Oregonian’s reporting on mismanagement of a federal program for disabled workers and once for the paper’s investigation of Mexican drug cartels in the state.
Just this week, Zaitz won Oregon’s top journalism honor – the Bruce Baer Award – for his investigation into state Rep. Greg Smith’s mingling of his government roles with his work as a private contractor. It’s the sixth time Zaitz has won the Baer award.
“Les is one of the most distinguished journalists to ever practice the craft in Oregon,” said Therese Bottomly, executive editor of The Oregonian/OregonLive. “He has always been extremely ambitious as an investigative reporter, but he always had absolute allegiance to the truth.”
Zaitz continues to serve as interim editor of another family paper, Keizertimes, and he remains editor of the Salem Reporter online news site.
Oregon newspapers have shed three-quarters of their jobs this century as their audiences and advertisers moved online. A study this spring by the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications found that nearly 20 Oregon news outlets have closed or merged with others in just the past three years.
The decline has been especially acute in rural communities, which often lose their only source of local news when their papers close.
A bill before the Oregon Legislature could require big tech companies like Google and Meta to pay upwards of $122 million to support journalism in the state, which lawmakers say would compensate local publications for the value they bring to search engines and social media platforms.
The bill is advancing in the Legislature but, if passed, faces a likely legal challenge from the tech industry.
On Tuesday, Zaitz wrote that he tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a merger of the Malheur Enterprise and the county’s other weekly, the Argus Observer. The Observer said on its website Tuesday that it is exploring the sale of its own business.
— Mike Rogoway covers Oregon technology and the state economy. Reach him at mrogoway@oregonian.com.
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