Brier Dudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative. This column was originally published in The Times on July 30th and is reprinted here with permission. Dudley’s work will appear regularly on the Medill Local News Initiative site.
Cuts to Oregon’s newspaper industry continue this month with the closure of two newspapers east of Portland.
Cuts to Oregon’s newspaper industry continue this month with the closure of two newspapers east of Portland.
I wonder if Oregon legislators regret not passing Senate Bill 686 in June. The legislation would have required tech giants profiting from news to pay $122 million a year to local news outlets, with payments allocated based on the number of journalists employed.
That might not have prevented the latest closures but it would have kept other newspapers afloat and saved hundreds of newsroom jobs.
The Sandy Post and Estacada News will stop publishing their print editions and merge with The Outlook in Gresham.
The papers were ghosts, with a single reporter working for both the Post and News, according to The Oregonian. It noted that The Outlook has one reporter.
All three were purchased last year by Carpenter Media, the Southern newspaper chain that also acquired Sound Publishing and the Everett Daily Herald. Its acquisition spree in Washington and Oregon was followed by a series of layoffs and cutbacks.
John Carr, publisher of Carpenter’s papers in Oregon, confirmed the sale in an email but didn’t comment on the newsroom head count.
Carr wrote that the Sandy and Estacada papers “did not have enough circulation” to justify keeping them as stand-alone print editions.
“They also shared the majority of their content with the Gresham Outlook,” he wrote, “so we merged the papers into what is now called “The Outlook, serving Gresham, Estacada and Sandy.”
Carr said Portland area consumers prefer getting news digitally.
“We are happy to keep a print product wherever the community can support it enough to make it viable, but if the community prefers digital, that is how we will deliver their news,” he wrote.
Carpenter last month announced plans to stop printing the Portland Tribune, the flagship of the Portland-area Pamplin newspaper group that it acquired last year. It also laid off at least five people in the Tribune’s newsroom, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
That follows layoffs last year at Carpenter papers in Bend, Medford and Wallowa County.
Oregon’s newspaper industry employment fell more than 80% over the last 25 years, worse than the 77% loss nationally, per OPB reporting in December.
Carr said passage of SB 686 would have been unlikely to stop the Sandy and Estacada closures because the bill would take time to implement and it’s unclear how much of the proceeds would flow to those publications.
But it would have been a different story elsewhere.
“We think it is highly likely it would have made a big difference in future cases throughout the state,” Carr wrote. “Future community news deserts may have been prevented.”
Laurie Hieb, executive director of the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, concurred.
“Papers not only would be able to stay open but have the ability to hire additional journalists,” she said via email. “There’s no question — we could have prevented the closure of some newspapers if we had been properly paid for the work Google continues to profit from.”
Dallas drama: The family that controls The Dallas Morning News parent company rejected a buyout offer from Alden Global Capital, another chain publisher known for buying newspapers then cutting staff.
DallasNews Corporation on June 9 accepted a $14 per share buyout offer from national publishing giant Hearst, which Alden’s MediaNews Group countered with a $16.50 per share offer.
Hearst upped its bid to $15, valuing the company at $80.3 million, according to a report in The Dallas Morning News.
The key decision to take less and reject Alden was made by Robert Decherd, the controlling shareholder and great-grandson of the paper’s co-founder.
“There are no circumstances under which I would vote for or support the MNG (MediaNews Group) proposal,” Decherd wrote in a letter to the board of directors, per the Morning News report. “I am focused, as I have always been, on the well-being of The Dallas Morning News, the quality of its journalism, and The News’ role in the city of Dallas.”
MediaNews Group’s Chicago Tribune simultaneously laid off about 10% of its newsroom, or eight employees, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
NYT’s prime deal: Amazon will pay The New York Times $20 million to $25 million yearly to use its news content, The Wall Street Journal reported, offering “a window into how publishers and artificial-intelligence companies are valuing news content in the midst of a seismic change in how consumers seek information online.”
Amazon can use the paper’s material to train AI models and provide news excerpts and summaries through products including Alexa, the report said. The deal was disclosed in May but not the payment amount.
It remains to be seen how many of America’s 5,600 other newspapers will secure fair payment from tech giants.
Until then, I fear these high-profile deals could worsen the local news crisis.
With a few big outlets feeding mostly national stories to AI platforms and Amazon’s media bundle, fewer people may feel the need to read and subscribe to local and regional outlets reporting on their communities.