The pullback of larger newspapers and shutdown of smaller ones, resulting in Oregon’s small town “new deserts,” caused some retired journalists to jump back into the game and start digital-only news sites.

Doug Bates, a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer with The Oregonian in Portland and former managing editor of The Register-Guard in Eugene, was retired to his hometown in Oakridge, 45 miles east of Eugene, when the local Dead Mountain Echo closed.

Pooling some of their Covid stimulus money, Bates and others formed the online Highway 58 Herald. One of Bates’s reporters is 92-year-old Dean Rea, a revered former journalism professor and editor.

The Herald covers school, government, development and other community news in a string of Upper Willamette communities: Oakridge, Westfir, Pleasant Hill, Lowell. Among other things, Bates raised critical questions about the local school district’s management and about a proposed gravel mine and the developer’s ties to elected officials.

Bates said his group is attempting to fill what he calls a “glaring news vacuum.” The Eugene paper and TV stations don’t regularly cover the area, he said.

“This is unacceptable,” he tells readers on the website. “I don’t know about you, but I need reliable news. I need it to help me participate fully in my community.”

Quinton Smith, another longtime editor at The Oregonian and other papers, provided Bates a model. Smith founded the nonprofit Yachats News after hearing otherwise intelligent people repeat bogus stories they’d seen on Facebook. Smith had retired to Yachats, in Lincoln County, and began attending local government meetings out of curiosity: he wanted to know what was going on.

He began covering Covid’s impact in the area because other media outlets were ignoring or overlooking it. This past spring, he unearthed the story of a local fire district chief who’d sent pornographic images to a female employee, insulted another employee’s ethnicity and generally rampaged for three years before the district board took action.

Smith said there is pent-up demand for local, factual, straight-ahead news reporting. The trick is making it pay. His site — now getting 60,000 monthly page views — carries enough advertising to pay expenses, but he doesn’t expect or need to make a living doing it. He’s 71, Bates in Oakridge is 74, and both hope someone or some organization will step in to continue the work.