As rural newspaper owners seek to retire, finding suitable buyers is hard; low income and long hours remain barriers

The Malheur Enterprise’s office in Vale, Oregon.
(Photo courtesy of Malheur Enterprise via Seattle Times)

Publishers of small, rural newspapers are having difficulty finding buyers, or the sort of buyer they are willing to have succeed them. Some have simply closed or retreated to Facebook, while others are hanging on and looking for someone to take over. One of those owns the Malheur Enterprise in eastern Oregon.

"After nearly 50 years in the business, local journalism hero Les Zaitz is ready to retire," writes Brier Dudley, free-press editor of The Seattle Times. "Zaitz faces an uphill battle to find a buyer for his labor of love. Finding a new generation to lead America's small but essential newspapers will be a challenge unless something changes to improve the industry's prospects . . . . The difficulty of finding buyers is one reason America is losing so many local newspapers — an average of two a week are closing, according to research by Northwestern University's Medill School."

The Malheur Enterprise is an "exemplar" newspaper, but finding a suitable buyer is still a struggle. Zaitz told Dudley: "We're pretty realistic. The universe of people who want to move to a rural county seat in a poor rural county is a pretty small pool, regardless of how good the journalism is." Dudley reports, "It's difficult to sell any business facing an uncertain future and formidable competition. Tech giants take most advertising dollars nowadays. Although surveys find Americans trust local news, people increasingly get news from social media and spend more time and subscription dollars on digital entertainment. . . . There are also fewer journalists — newspaper staffing fell nearly 70% over the last two decades."

Les Zaitz

The decline of newspapers has made banks less willing to finance them, Dudley reports: "There's a lack of local capital in rural towns and counties, said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. Cross hoped that people who left or lost jobs at bigger papers would be willing to become entrepreneurs and buy rural ones. . . . That happened in some places — Zaitz previously worked at The Oregonian — and Cross can list a number of promising new ones. . . . Medill's research found around 550 digital news startups nationally in 2022. A cluster of philanthropic organizations is working to seed more such ventures, primarily nonprofits. . . . But Medill found most of the digital outlets are in metro areas, and closures across the industry have outpaced startups."

In order for a new generation of journalists to take on local paper as a livelihood, barriers such as  income and too many long hours will need to be addressed. Zaitz told Dudley, "I'm kind of lean on staffing, and I work way too many hours, which is why I'm looking at retirement because I've just worn myself to a nub over the last five years."

Dudley reports, "Cross believes journalism veterans are less likely to acquire small papers nowadays because fewer are willing or able to live on the $50,000 a year they may eke from the business." Cross told Dudley: "You need to have an income that will support at least one household, and there are lots of papers still left in this country where it's essentially one couple putting this thing out. The idea of busting your butt to serve the public and not making a lot of money is no longer appealing to many young people."