The first email hit my inbox Monday morning with the subject line “Wow! Pamplin sold?” and a one-sentence question: “What are you hearing?”

It came from a journalist at a Portland newsroom curious about what I knew about the sale of Pamplin Media Group, where I had worked for 18 years. (The answer: not much.) The second query, from another journalist, came shortly after, by text: “Who the (bleep) are Carpenter Media?”

The reports that Pamplin, Oregon’s largest locally-owned media organization, had been sold to the Mississippi-based Carpenter Media Group was followed only hours later by an announcement from EO Media, the state’s second-largest locally owned news shop in Oregon: It, too, is for sale.

The news shook reporters and editors who have watched some of Oregon’s most storied local publications, including the Medford Mail Tribune, the Salem Statesman Journal and the Eugene Register-Guard, gutted inrecent years by out-of-state owners.

I see last Monday’s developments as very different, and not just because I’m a pint-half-full kind of a guy.

New ownership will certainly present challenges but also huge opportunities for communities that rely on existing local news sources, as well as for those underserved by the media.

Three years ago, a group of veteran Oregon journalists began discussing ways to address the decline of local news. That led a handful of us to start Oregon News Exploration.

With donations from business, labor and civic leaders, matched by the Oregon Community Foundation, we set out to find out where Oregonians get their local information and what they think about it. A series of statewide surveys and focus groups found some troubling trends:

• Rural residents feel that statewide news organizations fail to accurately represent their views and cater to an urban, and more liberal, audience.

• Oregonians of color don’t see their life experiences reflected in local news. More than three-fourths say their communities are negatively impacted by the lack of culturally informed coverage.

• People who prefer to get news in a language other than English struggle to find basic information and often feel alienated from civic life.

• All this leads to a reliance on social media, where misinformation thrives.

So, where do I see hope?

Our research also found that Oregonians are more likely than most U.S. residents to trust their local news — trust increases when they regularly see journalists in their communities. And our conversations with journalists across the state showed a collaborative spirit and united commitment to preserve local news.

We also see hope outside of Oregon, where more than 500 nonprofit news organizations are filling information gaps in a variety of creative ways.

Newsrooms from Spokane to Atlanta are hiring community members to attend public meetings and report back to their communities. Journalists from Memphis to Oakland have started new digital news sites to reach audiences who have not been traditionally served by the media.

In Oregon, the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism is training young journalists, Underscore News is providing in-depth reporting of indigenous communities, The Lund Report goes deep on health care, Street Roots is shining a spotlight on homelessness and the Agora Journalism Center is continuing its statewide listening sessions on local information needs in underserved areas.

After three years of research, Oregon News Exploration has developed a new, scalable model to empower underserved communities. We plan to hire journalists and community members to provide fact-based information through small local news networks.

Nationally, philanthropic groups are showing their appreciation for the value of local news. A group of national foundations recently put up half a billion dollars to support a local news initiative, and in many areas, from central Pennsylvania to central California, local campaigns have sprung up to address specific local needs.

Most importantly, there’s a growing recognition outside of Oregon that trusted local information is as important a community asset as public parks, safe streets and clean water.

Because without accessible information, Oregonians struggle to find the information they need to live their best lives. And they’re more likely to depend on polarizing national news narratives and social media to shape their views of their communities, which our research tells us makes them more distrustful of civic leaders.

In many regions around the country, support for local news was fueled by a cataclysmic event: the collapse of a major metropolitan daily newspaper. In Oregon, we’ve been spared that, but it’s come at a cost: a lack of urgency to address the growing information gaps we first identified four years ago.

Oregon’s journalism landscape is about to change. We can either sit back and hope for the best or come together and chart a new path to ensure that all Oregonians, regardless of their race, income or zip code, have trusted sources of local information.

This column originally appeared in The Oregonian.