A thriving local newspaper in the acutely remote West

NPR ran a feature this morning on The Malheur Enterprise, a (now) highly successful local, weekly newspaper based in Malheur County, Oregon, right on the Idaho state line.  If the proper name "Malheur" rings a bell, it may be because that's also the name of the national wildlife refuge that the Bundy brothers and co. seized in January, 2016.  Read posts about that incident here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  One of those posts mentions Les Zaitz, a rancher from eastern Oregon who also wrote a column for the statewide paper, The Oregonian, and has twice been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.  Turns out, it is Zaitz and his family who bought The Malheur Enterprise in 2015, and they have quickly revamped and revitalized what was a dying paper.   NPR's Tom Goldman describes the Enterprise in its prior incarnation as almost out of business, filed with press releases and doing a good job of covering only one subject:  local high school sports.  Zaitz explains:

It had not had an ad sales person in ten years. It took only what business came in the front door.  There was just no doubt in my mind that if we turned around the news product, and got a sales person in, we could make the thing profitable pretty quick.

In fact, Since Zaitz took over the paper, its circulation has "surged," and it has "won several national awards."  Goldman continues under the headline, "Revenue has tripled":

"Boomed" is a relative term when it comes to a rural weekly. Paid subscriptions are at about 2,000. But during a recent week, more than a third of Malheur County's roughly 30,000 residents read the paper's online edition. And advertising dollars, the lifeblood of a small newspaper, are way up.

Those 2,000 subscribers number about the same as the residents of the county seat, Vale, where the paper is based.  Goldman again quotes Zaitz: 

Our overall revenue is more than triple what it was three years ago.  Circulation is probably double. We're profitable and there are not a lot of papers in the United States that can say they're profitable.

Another cute aspect of the story is the focus on the 74-year-old woman who delivers it from her white pick up truck, logging more than a 100 miles each Wednesday as she traverses Oregon's second largest county. 

As it happens, I was on a small team of folks who tried to get Les Zaitz to Portland this past summer for a panel on the Malheur seizure at the Rural Sociological Society's Annual Meeting.  His email response said:

Your invitation is very kind but I won't be available those dates. Just so you know, my day office is about 350 miles from Portland these days.

I got a kick out of his focus on distance--as if we non Oregonians would have no clue as to just how big Oregon is and just how far his home in the southeastern reaches of the state is from the better known (and hipster) Portland. 

The story about the Malheur Enterprise reminds me of my earlier musings on the success of Iowa's Storm Lake Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing a few years ago.  That Pulitzer prize led to publisher Art Cullen's writing of his first book, Storm Lake, which I began reading a few weeks ago.  It's essentially a social, cultural and family history of northwest Iowa. 

I'm also reminded of David Leonhardt's column in the New York Times a few days ago urging everyone to subscribe to--and thereby support--a local newspaper.  Democracy cannot survive without it.