Publisher Les Zaitz spent three years trying to save his pride and joy.
His Malheur Enterprise weekly newspaper on Oregon’s eastern border had an acclaimed reputation for hard-hitting investigative reporting. To keep it open, Zaitz was willing to make a deal. He even offered to train his successor to smooth the transition.
Eventually, his patience ran out. Unable to lure a new owner to rural Malheur County, Zaitz took the excruciating step of closing The Enterprise in May.
Zaitz embodies an alarming trend in local news: the shrinking ranks of independent publishers.
Like Zaitz, many independent publishers are reluctantly throwing in the towel because they can’t find a successor or investor willing to take on the risk as revenues and audiences decline.
Medill’s 2025 State of Local News Report confirmed this troubling pattern. Fewer than half of all U.S. newspapers, 46%, are independently owned. That’s down from 54% two decades ago.
This decline is more severe among dailies: Fewer than 15% remain independently owned.
Of the 136 newspaper closures and mergers since July 2024, a majority of those outlets had been independently owned, a Medill analysis found.
What’s a small, independent owner to do?
Consolidation may make sense for publications with smaller audiences, less advertising and overlapping roles at adjacent operations. But local journalism suffers if those savings aren’t reinvested in newsrooms. Already-thin staffs get smaller as roles and content are combined across chains.
That leads to less diversity of voices covering local communities, eventually making the ecosystem more susceptible to national political and economic pressures.
Yet selling to a chain is sometimes the best option for local publishers grappling with declines in advertising amid rising costs, technology upgrades and intense competition for readers’ attention.
Those challenges also make it harder for independent owners to navigate generational changes. Sales or closures happen when aging owners are unable to find family members or others willing to run what are essentially high-risk, low-margin small businesses, despite their outsize importance to local communities and democracy.
Successfully managing these transitions is one key to slowing and potentially stopping the decline of America’s local newspaper industry.
Here are examples of what local newspapers in the Northwest are doing to survive and remain independent. They include selling to employees, diversifying print operations and cultivating the next generation of operators.
Sunnyside up
Darkness was falling on The Daily Sun News in 2018.
The paper was a fixture in Sunnyside, a farm town in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where 87% of the population is Hispanic. But a regional chain that had owned The Sun since the 1980s decided to close it.
Representatives of Eagle Newspapers were driving from Oregon to pull the plug when interim publisher Andy McNab threw a hail Mary.
McNab was hired by Eagle in mid-2018 and directed to wind things down. But after looking over the business he thought it was viable as a weekly, “if you get rid of corporate ownership demands.”
“I called them up and I said, ‘hey, tell you what, for this pittance amount, don’t close it, just give it to me,’” McNab said in an interview.
Eagle agreed even before the suits had arrived. So McNab gathered Sun employees and made a life-changing offer.
“You’ve got two choices,” he recalled saying. “You can commit to owning this newspaper in five years, or you don’t have a job today, by the end of the day, because Eagle’s coming to close you down.”
Employees Ileana Martinez and Job Wise were gobsmacked but agreed to the deal. In early 2024 they officially became co-owners and publishers of what’s now The Sunnyside Sun weekly.
“There are obviously struggles that we have but we’re still going,” Wise said. “We’re still printing, still have our subscribers.”
“Still independent,” Martinez added.
Both were hired as graphic designers, Martinez in 2013 and Wise in 2008. Now she is managing editor and he is general manager, roles that overlap at a business with just two other employees: a reporter and part-time bookkeeper.
Martinez, 33, had previously never worked in news. Her closest experience was helping with her high school yearbook and taking a summer graphic-design course.
“I was working a graveyard shift at Walmart and I saw a job listing and decided to apply for it,” she said. “Within a week I was working here.”
The Sunnyside native grew up with the paper, though, because her family subscribed.
“They had to — I was on the varsity bowling team so they had to look for the picture every week,” she said. “Funny story, there never was a photo of me in it.”
Wise, 43, moved from California, looking for work. He depended on the job to support a family with six children, the youngest of whom was 1 when McNab made the offer.
“A bit of a risk factor there but it’s worked out so far,” Wise said.
The acquisition was facilitated by a $50,000, low-interest loan the city’s economic development commission provided, using funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.
McNab’s offer included a commitment to teach Wise and Martinez how to run the business.
“At the end of five years I would turn it back over to them at a price that they could afford, whether it’s through the bank or making money and whatever else,” he said. “I picked it up for cents on the dollar and I expected to sell it in five years for cents on the dollar, and that’s basically what we did.”
This wasn’t the first time McNab returned an Eagle castoff to local ownership found within the building.
McNab became publisher of Eagle’s Idaho County Free Press in 1993. When he retired in 2015, General Manager Sarah Klement succeeded him and then acquired the paper from Eagle in 2019.
Grooming employees for ownership is one way to preserve newspapers that might otherwise close or be consolidated. It’s an option for corporate owners when paring their newspaper holdings.
Ownership opportunities also incentivize newspaper employees to stick with low-paying jobs.
“It’s tougher, and you’re not going to make money that we did in, say, the ’70s,” McNab said. “But you can still make a pretty decent living.”
A larger question is whether there are enough employees across the news industry to assume ownership of the 1,900 remaining independent papers. With newspaper industry employment down three-fourths over the past 20 years, there are fewer people gaining industry experience and fewer yet who might consider a second act publishing a community newspaper.
McNab lucked out in Sunnyside: It took him less than half an hour.
“It was a very spontaneous decision because he gave us about 20 minutes to decide,” Martinez said.
The sale price was $45,000 — $40,000 plus an agreement to pay off the company truck, Wise said.
“Yeah, we didn’t want the truck but we agreed to pay for it and he gets to keep it,” Martinez said, laughing.
The Sun is profitable and paid off its debt this summer after receiving a $50,000 grant from the Inatai Foundation, a Seattle philanthropic organization.
Hacking the press
A growing number of newspaper publishers see printing as an antiquated drag on their business.
Not Nathan Alford, the fourth-generation publisher of The Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune.
To keep churning out quality journalism, Alford turned the Tribune and its production facility into a skunkworks.
He’s developing a series of startups, drawing on the company’s 133 years of experience producing, bundling and distributing printed materials and advertising. Six ventures have launched since 2011, with a seventh coming in 2026, all to support the Tribune’s core mission.
The developments are physically represented by a modern production facility standing tall next to the newspaper’s single-story, midcentury offices in downtown Lewiston, at the intersection of the Snake and Clearwater rivers.
“We’re growing so much over here to underwrite the stuff over there — it’s like a big team effort,” Alford, 54, said in the production facility, waving toward the newsroom.
The facility has a growing collection of purchased, scavenged and customized machines producing new products.
“So every dollar we make over here goes back into covering the losses of the newspaper,” Alford said over the whir of forklifts and hum of presses. “We’re still not making enough, we need to get better, but we’re fighting.”
The Tribune remains a for-profit but is also pursuing partnerships with local foundations to support several coverage areas.
Alford said the strategy is to push innovation across the company, channeling the entrepreneurial drive that brought his great-grandfather and great-great uncle north from Texas, via Portland, with a printing press in 1892.
“We need to have the pioneering spirit of our founders to evolve into a sustainable, adaptable, ever-increasing business,” he said.
To reach younger audiences, the Tribune started a weekly, events-oriented publication called Inland 360 in 2011. A direct-mail business and an outdoor advertising venture operating electronic billboards followed.
Coming soon is a video lab, in a converted press workers’ break room, that will broadcast short news segments to social networks and produce sponsored content.
Alford began hacking the Tribune’s production facility in 2019, after the family acquired a commercial printing company in Spokane.
The Tribune worked with the manufacturer to do more with its main press while also buying and reassembling other equipment to create new lines of business.
One machine was used to make the plastic films covering the face of new iPhones. After the manufacturer in Ohio went bust, Alford got the machine free and converted it to handle paper products.
In one corner of the facility are pallets of wrapping paper, printed by the main press on recycled paper, bound for national retailers this holiday season.
In another corner is a product Alford dubbed “e-commerce paper.” Its modified press produces the recycled “void fill” material that online retailers use to wrap products. One customer, an outdoor equipment company, gets the paper printed with maps of wild rivers.
Alford’s company also works on papers certified for use with food products and provides an ammunition manufacturer with paper used to make bullets.
Yet another machine prints special materials for packaging medical devices.
Instead of seeing the press, production crew and mailroom as places to trim costs, Alford saw them as places to innovate.
Instead of seeing the press, production crew and mailroom as places to trim costs, Alford saw them as places to innovate.
“Our mind-set is so important,” he said. “I think many newspapers across the country adopt kind of a custodial mind-set, where you’re more managing the current climate and you’re trying your best to cut expense, to match the declining revenue, or you’re the custodian of that legacy business. Versus waking up and hitting the front door in the morning with more of a founder’s mind-set.”
Chains tried repeatedly to acquire the Tribune over the years.
It happened once, after other descendants of the founders sold 67% of their shares in 1981. That led to the Tribune being owned by the parent company of the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah, which in turn was acquired by Denver-based cable TV giant TCI.
Alford’s father, A.L. “Butch” Alford, Jr., bought the Tribune and several smaller papers in the region back from TCI in 1998.
“Nothing against the chains,” said Butch Alford, Jr., 87, “but they’re a bunch of financial bastards.”
Buying back the Tribune re-committed the family to the paper’s survival.
“That was really the turning point,” Nathan Alford said. “Most folks at Butch’s age at that point, I think, would have said okay, well, I’ve had my career and we’ve had our three generations. But counter to the corporate trend at the time — most of these papers in the late ’90s were being swallowed up by larger companies — Dad put all his pennies and dollars back into our community newspaper.”
In those years, Nathan Alford was studying law in Spokane and working summers in the newsroom. After graduating in 2001 he decided to try keeping the paper “going another generation.”
He became publisher in 2008, just as recession and technology disrupted the news business, major advertisers evaporated and many in the industry made painful cuts to stay afloat.
Today the newsroom has around 25 employees and the overall company employs 105, including 44 in the production facility.
Margins are 2% to 3%, Alford said, but they need to have at least 10% operating profit for stability and sustainability.
All in the family
Will Campbell trained to be a paramedic before studying journalism, so when the newspaper editor came upon a burning RV in the road in Vancouver, Wash., he was ready for whatever happened next.
Fortunately the RV’s owner, Jill, was safely out of the vehicle.
Jill told Campbell she’d lost her job, couldn’t pay rent and had moved into the RV two weeks earlier. Her life’s possession were aflame, and she was now among Vancouver’s growing homeless population.
“I thanked her and wished her the best of luck and went back to the newsroom and wrote up the little, tiny story with a photograph,” Campbell recalled in an interview.
Still, Campbell was shaken by the 2020 incident – and the feeling that The Columbian, the daily paper his family owned since 1921, wasn’t able to tell the full story.
“Homelessness is such a big issue in our county, and we didn’t have the means to go and find out how many more people are dealing with this, or what resources did Jill have, or what are the barriers for her getting back on her feet. And so that felt like we were missing so much,” he said.
So Campbell and his brother, Publisher Ben Campbell, began seeking donations from nonprofits and individuals so The Columbian could better cover housing and homelessness in the region.
It’s part of a broader effort by the Campbells to cautiously but steadily diversify revenue, maintain a decent newsroom and positive workplace, and preserve the paper for generations to come.
“We grew up here,” Will Campbell said. “We have such a strong emotional connection, that overrides the need for a max profit. We sacrifice a lot of profit and a lot of opportunity in other industries to just put our heart and soul into The Columbian. This is our community, and this is the heartbeat of the community.”
Asking the community to help raised $1.6 million since 2022 — equivalent to $3 from every resident of Clark County. That enabled The Columbian to hire five additional journalists, two of whom would report hundreds of stories on homelessness. After turnover, the program now supports three full-timers and one intern.
“It’s been great to tell those stories. It’s critical for changing the whole narrative of homelessness,” Will Campbell said.
The results were clear to reader Dee Anne Finken, a former journalism instructor at nearby Clark College.
The paper has reduced staffing since she moved to the area 28 years ago, Finken said, and provides fewer national stories.
“They can’t cover as much,” she said, but “they do a darn good job covering the homelessness problem.”
The Campbell family nurtured successive generations to maintain its independent ownership.
Ben Campbell, 37, became publisher when his father, Scott, retired in 2020. He briefly worked in television but returned to fill a digital strategist job in The Columbian’s advertising department.
Will, 35, initially chose to be a paramedic. He came to realize that a big part of emergency medicine work was interviewing patients and that he really enjoyed writing. He went to journalism school and spent two years as a public-safety reporter in Spokane before taking an editing job at The Columbian.
In 2024 the brothers became co-owners, buying out their parents and brother. Will Campbell became the top editor last January.
Young brothers taking the helm of a family business in a riverside city could be a Hallmark plotline. But the story isn’t entirely upbeat. As at every independent newspaper, business is tight and the future is uncertain.
Fifteen years ago, the family nearly lost the paper. It built a fancy new headquarters just before the 2008 recession hit, crashing both its newspaper business and foray into commercial real estate.
The Columbian filed for bankruptcy protection, put the tower up for sale, moved back into its circa-1950 building and began cutting more than 100 jobs.
That could break a family business and repel the next generation. But Will and Ben Campbell said things never turned bitter.
If anything, that experience strengthened their resolve to carefully steward The Columbian.
They receive emails now and then about being acquired, but “we would not really entertain those offers if they were knocking at the door,” Ben Campbell said.
“Will and I are both in our 30s and we have a long career ahead of us. We both really love this place and we have fun,” he said.
The Columbian is surrounded by papers that are no longer independent. Across the river in Oregon, nearly every daily newspaper is owned by national chains.
The latest entrant is Carpenter Media Group, a Southern chain that bought nearly half of Oregon’s remaining papers from local families, closed several mastheads, cut newsroom jobs and shuttered one of the newest print facilities in the West.
In June, Carpenter stopped printing the Portland Tribune and laid off at least five staffers, The Oregonian reported. It also closed two suburban weeklies, consolidating them into a third and laying off their last reporter.
In Washington, the Campbells are one of four remaining local families publishing general interest dailies.
Soon there will be three.
The next generation of the Cowles family in Spokane declined to become publishers of The Spokesman-Review, so it’s being donated to a nonprofit. Worsening business conditions were a deciding factor, Publisher William “Stacey” Cowles said when the announcement was made in April.
“Had there been somebody who was desperate to be publisher of a newspaper we may have hung on a little longer,” he said. “It’s going to be tough, even having philanthropic dollars.”
That leaves the Campbells, the Taylor family in Centralia, and the Blethen family, publishers of The Seattle Times and papers in Yakima and Walla Walla that print three days a week.
The Oregonian, a daily owned by the media conglomerate Advance Communications, used to be a competitive threat to The Columbian. Then it closed its Vancouver bureau in 2008 and reduced print frequency to four days. The Columbian is holding steady with six print editions per week.
“We don’t lose sleep, really, over any other news outlet,” Will Campbell said. “I lose sleep over having 500,000 unique visitors to the website and only really 14,000 accounts subscribing.”
The paper has around 10,000 print subscribers. It employs about 100 people, including 29 in the newsroom.
Two more potential employees are in the wings: Ben Campbell’s sons, who are 4 and 2 years old.
“It’s an important piece of our community and so our goal is to keep that as strong as possible,” Will Campbell said. “Another goal of ours is to have it be appealing enough to the next generation, Ben’s kids and my future kids … if they want to work here.”
