On election nights, there should be electricity in a newsroom — and pizza bought by the editor.

Yet on the evening of Aug. 5, the night of a busy primary in Skamania County, the lights were out at the county’s only local newspaper.

The Skamania County Pioneer’s storefront office, a few blocks from the courthouse in Stevenson, is now a bookstore.

There are old papers in back, and the store collects subscription payments. But the Pioneer hasn’t employed a journalist in the county since its former editor, Philip Watness, retired in May 2024.

I was there to see whether Skamania County is a news desert, joining the hundreds of U.S. counties that no longer have a local news organization.

Answering this question isn’t straightforward, even though I was able to buy the Pioneer’s Aug. 6 editio

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