Salem Reporter
Online newspaper published in Salem, Oregon
Salem Reporter is a digital news service based in Salem, Oregon.
History
The Salem Reporter was launched in September 2018 by longtime investigative journalist Les Zaitz, with investment from businessman Larry Tokarski, president of a real estate development firm. Its primary revenue source is from reader subscriptions, which cost $10/month. The site aims to distinguish itself from its competitors with the quality and credibility of its reporting. According to local news scholar Damian Radcliffe, the Reporter's freedom from the legacy costs associated with a traditional newspaper like the Statesman Journal has allowed it to enter the field with unusual agility.
Shortly after its launch, the Salem Reporter joined the Pamplin Media Group and the EO Media Group in a partnership named the Oregon Capital Bureau. The bureau was formed by the original partners 2014, to provide its constituent newspapers with reporting on state government; it produces a newsletter called the Oregon Capital Insider. Zaitz leads the bureau's team of three reporters.
Zaitz, a renowned investigative reporter for The Oregonian who, upon his retirement, bought and revitalized the Malheur Enterprise several years prior, saying he was motivated by a desire to create "a new financial paradigm for the newspaper that can be replicated and scaled up." In speeches in 2018, Zaitz emphasized restoring trust in media as a top priority for the journalism industry.
In June 2025, Zaitz bought out Tokarski's share of the company.
The public source identifies “Salem Reporter” as online newspaper published in Salem, Oregon. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Salem, Reporter and Online.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q57982430. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2014 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Salem Reporter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.