Jeremy Gulban was trying to pause, after a spree of acquiring newspapers in small towns where Wall Street firms had milked their local papers dry.
But he couldn’t resist the opportunity when Alden Global Capital closed a group of six Minnesota papers in late April.
Gulban’s CherryRoad Media is launching two new papers to serve communities abandoned by Alden.
Perhaps he’s foolhardy. But America needs more entrepreneurs like Gulban, willing to take a chance on fixer-upper newspapers that thousands of local communities and millions of voters still rely on to stay informed.
The 49-year-old New Jersey tech executive began buying newspapers four years ago, believing that his management and software skills could turn things around.
Since then Gulban acquired or started 85 papers in what might otherwise be news deserts in 18 states. Most are weeklies but three print five days per week and around a dozen print two or three days per week.
“I think it’s been rewarding overall,” he said. “But it’s been really hard work and really kind of tough to figure this out. I think we’re coming up with a model that makes smaller market newspapers sustainable … focusing on local, real people producing local content, and figuring out how to do everything else as efficiently as possible.”
CherryRoad Media also acquired presses in Minnesota, Kansas and Ohio that are also printing surviving papers in surrounding communities. It employs around 500 people and Gulban expects revenue to be around $30 million this year.
The company is also offering “newspaper as a service” software, including cloud-based storage and circulation systems, which was part of Gulban’s original vision.
Gulban bought his first masthead, the Cook County News-Herald, in Minnesota in late 2020. It turned out to be a good market for newspapers and CherryRoad will shortly have a dozen in the state.
With encouragement from community leaders, CherryRoad on April 26 announced plans to launch weeklies replacing the Hutchinson Leader and Litchfield Independent Review, two of eight Minnesota papers that Alden just closed.
“That made it a really easy decision, we were already there,” he said.
Key staffers at the Alden papers were hired by CherryRoad. Gulban believes they can retain “the vast majority” of roughly 2,000 subscribers the two papers each had before closing.
I’m rooting for Gulban to find the right formula, not just for his company but hopefully to encourage other potential publishers.
If he succeeds, that will help prove that there’s still opportunity in the business, demand remains for local papers and their public-service mission can be sustained, with an infusion of resources and technology.
“It’s a lot of work and it’s hard, there’s a lot of setbacks,” he said. “But at the end of the day I just really enjoy what I’m doing and I would really encourage others to do it or pull together resources in the community” to publish local papers.
I interviewed Gulban in 2021 and caught up with him again last week. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:
Q: Is CherryRoad Media profitable yet?
A: It hasn’t been up until now but I believe this coming month, we will finally turn the corner on that, so that’ll be good.
Q: Did that take longer than you thought?
A: Totally. I was naive coming into this, with how quickly things can be turned around. We have some properties that are really, really strong and we have others that are really poor performers financially. We try to take the approach “we don’t want to give up on the market, we want to make this work.” Other people in the industry advised “you’ve got to be more prepared to just walk away from the bad markets” but we’ve really tried not to do that.
Q: Are you offloading some papers?
A: We consolidated a couple small papers into neighboring papers and we closed some free weeklies that have only been around a few years and really weren’t serving a purpose. We sold four to our local staff in each place. But we’ve not given up on any of the core markets, which financially has hurt us, but we’re trying to see this through, trying to keep papers in these communities.
Q: I fear some small, less economically robust communities may not be able to support a newspaper.
A: The news desert problem, in my opinion, is the size of the market and the income of the market. A lot of our counties are 10,000 people or maybe less, which is very small, and different parts of the country have lower incomes than you find in the Northeast or Northwest. That all comes into play and I don’t see anything that’s being discussed really solving that problem. A lot of the philanthropy movement is not looking at those communities because people who have means don’t live in those communities. So there’s not enough wealthy people to fund something like that, there’s not enough income to drive the subscriber base and there’s not enough businesses on Main Street to be advertisers. All of that is really, to me, where a lot of the news desert problem comes from.
Q: I wonder if Wall Street chains will shed more papers in the next few years, creating more opportunities for locals or small chains.
A: Probably. There are a few factors. Print revenue is obviously declining and it takes work to transition over to a digital future. We have a long-term perspective on this, 10 years or 20 years, whatever, we’re in it for the long run. But if you’re not and you’re a financial organization, the return of running the St. Paul paper is so much better than running papers in Hutchinson and Litchfield, so you’re going to focus your energy on the St. Pauls of the world, not the smaller markets, so you’ll see more of that.
Q: How big are your newsrooms?
A: Most are one or two full-time equivalents. In small markets some are half that and some of our larger ones have more people. But we’ve pretty much figured out how we get one or two people in the market, out on the street, getting information, getting stories, and that’s where we’re spending the money.
Q: What’s your sweet spot?
A: A county population of about 20,000 to 25,000 is good for us. We feel like we can get 15% of the households in that market to be a paid subscriber, bring in our fair share of advertising and then we’ve got a viable economic model.
Q: What’s the option in smaller places?
A: Local ownership is probably one of the best models for this going forward. It played out in the four markets I spoke about earlier, where (employees) could run the paper way better than we ever could because they’re there every day and they have sweat equity in it.
Brier Dudley on Twitter: @BrierDudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative. Its weekly newsletter: https://st.news/FreePressNewsletter. Reach him at bdudley@seattletimes.com.
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