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Medford’s Mail Tribune, one of Oregon’s oldest operating news organizations, said Wednesday it would shut down by the end of the week.

Publisher and CEO Steven Saslow announced the newspaper’s abrupt closure on its website, saying that unused paid subscriptions would be refunded. The paper stopped producing a print edition in September but lived on in a digital format. It will cease all publication on Friday.

“This was a difficult business decision,” wrote Saslow, whose Rosebud Media bought the paper from GateHouse Media in 2017. “The shuttering of this institution is a real loss for all constituents in Southern Oregon.”

He wrote that declines in advertising spending and difficulty hiring staff precipitated the closure. Rosebud Media closed a sibling paper, the Ashland Daily Tidings, in 2021.

It will result in dramatic loss of news coverage for the biggest population center in Southern Oregon. Medford has more than 85,000 residents.

The newspaper dates to the late 1800s through a predecessor but produced the first edition as the Medford Mail Tribune in 1907. In 1934, it won a Pulitzer Prize for public service, the first news organization in Oregon to do so. The citation came in response to the paper’s “campaign against unscrupulous politicians in Jackson County.”