Note from Brier Dudley: This was produced with the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School. The Seattle Times is publishing it as a three-part series over the next week.

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.

I’m sharing 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.

Darkness was falling on The Daily Sun News in 2018.

The paper was a fixture in Sunnyside, a Yakima Valley farm town 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.

Eagle agreed 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, 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 with around 600 subscribers. It paid off its debt last summer after receiving a $50,000 grant from the Inatai Foundation, a Seattle philanthropic organization.

Martinez recalled that independence was a concern of city leaders. When considering the loan, they asked whether Martinez and Wise planned to sell the paper to another chain.

“As long as the people want it,” she said, “I’ll be here.”

This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.