A bill in Salem would help sustain local news.

Stand close enough to a waterfall and you can be drowned in a kind of silence. Your children could be yelling. Your dog could be barking. But you may not pick any of that up.

That can be what it’s like when local newspapers go away. The school board still meets and makes decisions about how your children are educated. The city government still meets and decides how your taxes are spent. The judges at the courthouse still make decisions that may take away a person’s freedom. You are much less likely to know.

House Bill 2605 aims to be a remedy against local journalism going away. And we need to be upfront about this: We as journalists and as a newspaper may benefit from this bill if it passes. We do believe you may benefit from it, as well.

The bill had a public hearing last week. No sooner did the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Khanh Pham, D-Portland, begin summing it up and she was already promising a fundamental change to it: removing a tax credit.

So if we go ahead and strike the tax credit, what the bill would do is provide one-time funding to a working group convened by the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon and the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism. The working group would survey the local journalism ecosystem across Oregon and try to prevent holes from forming where communities go unserved by local journalism. The group might issue grants in an emergency. It would be directed to come up with a report by November 2024 to make recommendations to the Legislature.

The bill as written did not designate a particular amount of money that would go to do this. Often those sorts of money questions are decided nearer to the end of the session.

We were particularly fond of the testimony on the bill from Heidi Wright, the chief operating officer of EO Media Group and publisher of The Bulletin in Bend; Jody Lawrence-Turner, the executive director of the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism; Nick Budnick and Erin Foote Morgan.

You can read their testimony and more online: tinyurl.com/2605testimony.

EO Media Group is the parent company of The Astorian.

If you are a reader of the editorial page, perhaps you share our hope that this bill will pass and that more local journalism will not go silent.