Missouri Press Association
Serving Missouri Newspapers Since 1867
Thanks to the efforts of Mayor Jackie Soptic and CherryRoad CEO Jeremy Gulban, Trenton and Grundy County once again have a newspaper.
The Trenton Telegraph, a community-owned weekly, is set to launch on Sept. 11. It replaces the Trenton Republican-Times, which had served Grundy County since 1864. Honeycutt Media closed the Republican-Times and The Clinton County Leader in Plattsburg after the June 19 issues.
The Grundy County Industrial Development Corporation owns the new paper, with CherryRoad providing the management and expertise. Under a profit-sharing agreement, CherryRoad will receive 70 percent of the proceeds.
“I’m excited about this community ownership model,” Gulban said. “If we can figure this out, it can be a model that can work in a lot of different places. It will make papers more sustainable in the long run.”
CherryRoad has started five other papers – four in Minnesota and one in Texas. It also recently restarted five papers in Ohio.
Soptic learned of CherryRoad’s investment in rural newspapers at a meeting in Chillicothe last year. She started an email exchange with Gulban, keeping him abreast of a precarious situation in Trenton.
“I felt having a local paper was so important to a small community,” Soptic said. “I kept corresponding with Jeremy and then let him know when the Republican-Times was going to stop publishing.”
Just four days after the R-T closed, Gulban and Jeff Elmblad, CherryRoad’s director of circulation, were in Trenton meeting with Soptic and getting a tour of the town.
Rather than acquiring the name from Honeycutt, Gulban decided to “start from scratch.”
“All the goodwill was gone,” he said. “We wanted a fresh start.”
Honi Brown, a sales rep for the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, also owned by CherryRoad, came up with the name for the new paper.
“We also considered calling it the Grundy County News, but the Telegraph had some good marketing potential,” Soptic said. “We didn’t want a political party name.”
The Telegraph will employ a reporter and four to five contributing writers. Brown will sell advertising for both papers.
“There’s a lot of synergy, with CherryRoad already being in Chillicothe,” Gulban said. “We are pretty clustered in the northern part of the state.”
CherryRoad owns 18 papers in Missouri – its No. 1 state for the most titles – including the Marshall Democrat-News, Boonville Daily News, Moberly Monitor Index, and Independence Examiner.
Since a Missouri State Statute requires that a newspaper be published regularly and consecutively for three years, the Trenton Telegraph will not be able to run public notices as the paper of record until 2028. However, because there is no other legal newspaper in Grundy County, the statute allows another paper that is generally circulated in the county to publish the notices.
“The Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune can run the legals,” Gulban said. “We’ll run them for free in the Trenton paper. It’s important that the legals are still published in Grundy County.”
Trenton, a city of 5,600 in north-central Missouri, is the home of North Central Missouri College. The city is blessed to have a radio station, KTTN-FM, which provides a heavy dose of local news.
“We’ve been spoiled to have a locally owned radio station and newspaper,” Soptic said. “We want to complement the radio station as much as we can with the new paper. They can’t be competitors.”
Wendell Lenhart, a member of the Missouri Newspaper Hall of Fame, sold the Trenton Republican-Times to Honeycutt Media in 2021. His family had owned the paper since 1963.
“I’m glad to see that somebody is going to pick up the torch and Trenton will once again have a newspaper,” Lenhart said.
