The Malheur Enterprise in Vale, Ore., shuts down after 116 years, leaving Malheur County's news coverage uncertain amid financial struggles.
Courtesy of the Malheur Enterprise
The end of the 116-year-old Malheur Enterprise came suddenly but definitively.
The Enterprise published a story last Tuesday that it’s closing permanently. The last print edition ran the following day, and online service is set to end on May 31.
The venerable newspaper had experienced a period of reinvigoration under new owners with accolades and resources coming in from across the country. But those owners couldn’t find a successor they trusted for the job before deciding to retire.
The Enterprise’s imminent shuttering puts the future of news coverage in Malheur County in a precarious position. The owner of the county’s only other newspaper, Argus Observer, is exploring a sale amid recent financial struggles.
On the far east side of the state, Malheur County is one of Oregon’s poorest and most sparsely populated counties. It’s at risk of seeing its entire news ecosystem wither away.
It’s the same story across much of the state. University of Oregon researcher Regina Lawrence said the media outlets left standing are struggling to keep up.
“There just aren’t the resources that there once were,” she said. “There’s fewer reporters covering local communities than ever. The underlying story is: you might have one, you might have two, you might have three outlets, but you also need to look at what are they actually able to produce.”
The end of the Enterprise
Based in the small town of Vale, the Malheur Enterprise was founded in 1909 with the backing of a mining promoter, according to the newspaper’s website.
Les Zaitz, center, meets with the Malheur Enterprise news staff in 2020. The 116-year-old newspaper was purchased by Zaitz and his wife Scotta Callister in 2015, and is set to close operations on May 31.
Courtesy of Malheur Enterprise
The newspaper got new life when married couple Les Zaitz and Scotta Callister bought the business in 2015. Zaitz is a longtime investigative reporter who was a multi-time Pulitzer Prize finalist with The Oregonian, and Callister is also a veteran journalist.
Zaitz told the East Oregonian that the Enterprise was “the worst newspaper in Oregon” when he bought it. He and Callister worked toward raising the paper’s profile, starting partnerships with organizations such as the University of Southern California’s journalism school and ProPublica, a national investigative newsroom.
He also helped launch multiple accountability projects of his own, including a yearslong investigation into state Rep. Greg Smith, a veteran Republican legislator from Heppner who also runs an economic development consulting business that holds contracts with local governments across Eastern Oregon. The Enterprise scrutinized Smith’s work in Malheur County and beyond, leading Smith to drop or lose multiple contracts.
Despite all of the Enterprise’s recognition, Zaitz put the newspaper up for sale in 2022. At the time, Zaitz said the business was still profitable and growing, but he was looking to retire after five decades in the industry.
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In a recent interview, Zaitz said there were prospective buyers for the Enterprise, but none met his standards.
“You have idealistic journalists who dream of running their own newspaper, but they have no clue how to run a business,” he said. “A newspaper is a business first, and a newspaper second.”
Zaitz said he also discussed a merger with the Argus Observer newspaper in nearby Ontario, but the offer was “rebuffed.”
“It made excellent business sense. It made excellent journalism sense,” he said. “You just have to look around Oregon and the rest of the country to see what’s happening. The poorest county and the state should not be asked to support two newspapers.”
The Argus Observer eyes a sale
The Argus Observer was founded as The Advocate in 1897. The newspaper's owner, Wick Communications, is exploring a sale amid recent financial struggles.
Courtesy of Leslie Thompson/Argus Observer
The owners of the Argus Observer might not be in any hurry to take on any new assets. On the same day Zaitz announced the Enterprise was closing, its parent company announced it was exploring a sale.
The Argus Observer is even older than the Enterprise, having been founded as The Advocate in 1897. The Advocate eventually became the Argus — the guardian in Greek mythology who used his 100 eyes to stay vigilant — and merged with the Eastern Oregon Observer.
Wick Communications, an Arizona company that owns more than two dozen newspapers across the western United States, bought the Argus Observer in 1968 and continues to operate it.
Last year, the Enterprise reported that the Argus Observer was cutting its newspaper production schedule from four days a week to two, and closing its Ontario printing press amid corporate financial struggles.
In its May 6 announcement, Wick stated that buying the news organization would be a good opportunity for a “local steward.”
Neither Argus Observer publisher Jeff Schumacher nor Wick CEO Josh O’Connor returned messages requesting comment.
Zaitz is ending his tenure in Malheur County, but he isn’t leaving journalism completely. He remains the CEO of the Salem Reporter news website, although it’s a role he said doesn’t require as much day-to-day responsibilities.
The Enterprise had three full-time employees and two part-timers when Zaitz announced its closure. With merger talks scuttled and no identified buyer, Zaitz said he decided it was time to retire.
A potential news desert in the High Desert
Since 2022, the University of Oregon’s Agora Journalism Center has been tracking the number of local news outlets across the state.
In their inaugural report, the authors wrote that Oregon’s 241 news organization weren’t evenly distributed. Rural counties often only had one news outlet, meaning they were at risk of becoming a “news desert,” an area with limited access to credible and comprehensive local news.
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The news about the news has only gotten worse since then. The most recent report from March shows that Oregon has lost nearly 20 outlets since 2022. A growing body of research shows that losing local media can lead to increased polarization and public corruption.
Regina Lawrence is the research director for the Agora Center and helps put together the report each year. She said she considers news deserts to exist on “a continuum”: While some communities might support a news outlet, the quality of the news they’re producing varies.
“If a county has one or two news outlets in it, in one sense, (it’s) like, ‘Hooray, good, they’ve still got some news outlets,’” she said. “But that’s not very much, especially considering the economic challenges for local news outlets these days. It’s increasingly hard for them to simply cover their communities.”
In Agora’s 2025 study, the Enterprise and the Argus Observer were the only documented news outlets in Malheur County. Should the Argus Observer eventually close, Lawrence said, Malheur County would become a news desert “by most definitions.”
Lawrence said the industry is also being affected by consolidation and contraction.
In 2024, Alabama-based Carpenter Media Group bought locally owned Pamplin Media Group, taking over more than a dozen local newspapers in the Portland metro area and beyond. Carpenter Media followed up a few months later by acquiring the EO Media Group, giving them a foothold in a large swath of Eastern Oregon. The transition process resulted in significant layoffs at both companies.
There are some signs of life in Oregon journalism: Lawrence pointed to the recent launch of Lookout Eugene-Springfield, a new news outlet in Lane County whose owners have found success with a similar startup in California.
But she admitted that Lookout’s model probably wouldn’t work in a rural community like Malheur County compared to the relative affluence of Eugene.
Lawrence said other startups in smaller communities like the Lincoln Chronicle on the Oregon Coast and Newsberg Media in Yamhill County might be more instructive for rural media, and the Agora Center would continue to track their progress.
Back in Malheur County, Zaitz said there are still stories worth covering. He highlighted the Treasure Valley Reload Center, an unfinished industrial park project near Nyssa, and the persistent child poverty that plagues the county.
Without the Enterprise, Zaitz thinks the Malheur County news gap will be filled by less reliable sources.
“Facebook is fine for the Rotary auction and the high school softball team fundraiser banquet,” he said.
“But when you get beyond that refrigerator news of the community, social media has proven itself to be an absolutely unreliable source of information for people, and that’s going to be a considerable challenge for the people of Malheur County.”
