With owners retiring, the Malheur Enterprise is closing after serving the community for more than 115 years.
The last print edition of the newspaper is May 7. The newspaper’s online service will end May 31.
The closure comes after the rural weekly, founded in 1909, earned a national reputation for tough investigative reporting holding public officials accountable. Last year, it was judged the best newspaper of its size in Oregon.
Publisher Les Zaitz, 69, and his wife, Scotta Callister, 72, former Enterprise publisher, have owned the newspaper since 2015. They each have been in Oregon journalism for 50 years – a combined record of a century of service to the state.
“The Enterprise is a strong business and represents the very best in community journalism,” said Zaitz. “With no successor in sight, it’s time for us to step back from decades of journalism to a slower pace with a renewed focused on family and friends.”
The decision was hard, the couple said, but inevitable. Large newspaper groups no longer buy such independent newspapers, and the pool has shrunk of people who want to, as owners, both run a business and a news organization.
Callister said the question of succession seems likely to continue to challenge independent news operations as owner-operators age.
“There’s been a lot of talk about saving rural news operations – focused on funding, training programs, digital upgrades – but you still need someone to run them, someone with both a passion for community and an understanding of the news business,” she said. “That’s increasingly tough to find.”
Zaitz said efforts to merge the Enterprise with the county’s other weekly newspaper, the Argus Observer in Ontario, were rebuffed.
The office in Vale is closed as of Wednesday, May 7. Those wishing pro-rated refunds for the remainder of their subscriptions can email [email protected] or write to PO Box 310, Vale OR 97918. Requests will be honored through May 31.
In a decade of ownership, Zaitz and Callister established the Enterprise as a trusted local news source unafraid to pursue challenging and controversial stories.
The Enterprise has been featured in regional, state and national publications.
Hanging on its office wall of awards is the Freedom of Information Award bestowed in 2018 by the national Investigative Reporters and Editors. The Enterprise was the first weekly newspaper to receive the honor, and it recognized the newspaper’s deep investigative work on Anthony Montwheeler.
The newspaper tracked how Montwheeler faked a mental illness to escape imprisonment and then was released by the state. In January 2017, he killed a former wife and, with her body in his truck, ran head-on into a couple on their way to work, killing David Bates of Vale.
Montwheeler is serving a life sentence.
Last year, the Enterprise won another national award, this time for its work investigating the Treasure Valley Reload Center and Greg Smith, a contractor and state legislator. The First Amendment Award was given to the family-owned newspaper by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a national journalism organization.
The newspaper’s work investigating Smith had a powerful impact. He quit his contract as economic development director for Malheur County and then quit as administrator of the rail center project. Last year, Eastern Oregon University terminated Smith from running a business center and the U.S. Defense Department earlier this year canceled funding for a small public agency over questionable pay to Smith, who runs the Columbia Development Authority.
As publisher in Vale, Zaitz has repeatedly been honored for his work in Malheur County by professional colleagues. He was awarded the national Gish Award in 2018 from the The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and named an SPJ Fellow in 2020, the top honor of the national Society of Professional Journalists. He was inducted into the Oregon Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2024.
The newspaper was a business success, adding special sections, moving strongly into the digital era and acquiring its own headquarters building in Vale.
Besides investigative reporting, the Enterprise established a reputation for helping the community get through major disasters.
In 2017, the newspaper provided crucial hour-by-hour reporting as Malheur County suffered from winter devastation.
As the paper reported in January 2017:
The most destructive winter storm to ever hit Malheur County continued to exact a heavy toll this week, even as skies and roads cleared.
A shuttered landmark building in downtown Vale collapsed Monday just hours after public officials taped it off out of concern.
Schools, businesses and government agencies all struggled to get back to normal. Job One remained getting snow off roofs.
When the county went strangely quiet in 2020 because of the pandemic, the Enterprise provided crucial day-to-day reports on school closures and more. As a community service, it provided restaurants free advertising to promote take-out service, a change in operations that helped many restaurants survive.
The newspaper mobilized when disaster hit again, this time in 2024 with megafires sweeping across hundreds of square miles of Malheur County. For a time, Vale braced to evacuate.
An arsonist set a fire in July not far from the community of Ironside, triggering a range fire that burned more than 133,000 acres. The fire surrounded Brogan, burned along farmland in the Willow Creek area and at one point threatened Vale.
“I’ve never seen a stretch of heat this long with winds that constantly blew this strong with fuels that way in 32 years,” one fire commander said.
Over the years, the Enterprise partnered with national organizations to bring more resources to Malheur County. That included extra reporting help arranged through Report for America and Pro Publica.
The newspaper also teamed up with the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC in Los Angeles to produce one of the most ambitious journalism projects undertaken in Malheur County.
Two professors and five journalism students worked for months to investigate child poverty. They did most of their work remotely, but finished with an intense two-week run of on-the-ground report in Malheur County.
The result was the five-part series, “Children in Crisis.”
The series opened this way:
Children in Malheur County are suffering in poverty, and that suffering has reached crisis proportions.
A Malheur Enterprise investigation found a lack of leadership, insufficient resources and splintered efforts to relieve child poverty. Malheur County’s children who squat in friends’ homes, depend on food pantries and grapple alone with mental illness have been hidden in plain sight.
The news team also chronicled day-to-day life in the county – high school sports championships, rodeos and community fairs, government spending decisions, businesses opening or closing, people honored for their service in the community.
“These are challenging times for Malheur County and for the country,” Zaitz said. “We end our service, confident we are leaving people better informed, more motivated to speak up, more resolute in ensuring that government serves their interests, not the other way around.”
