This article was originally published by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and is republished here with permission.

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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 provided by the city’s economic development commission, 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.

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.”

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Tags: community journalism, family-owned newspapers, independent newspapers, Local journalism, local news, media ownership, Medill, Medill State of Local News, newspaper closures, newspaper consolidation, newsroom sustainability, Oregon journalism, Washington journalism

Brier Dudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press public service initiative, which reports on the local journalism crisis and advocates for…

Brier Dudley

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