Missouri Press Association
Serving Missouri Newspapers Since 1867
Local News Initiative — With the 2020 purchase of the Cook County News Herald in Northeast Minnesota, Jeremy Gulban launched the fast-growing CherryRoad Media chain of community newspapers. The company’s portfolio has ballooned to 94 newspapers — all but one print, most weekly — as CEO Gulban tries on the fly to make his business model sustainable for CherryRoad and a greater local news industry working in the shadows of Big Tech.
CherryRoad Media is an offshoot of CherryRoad Technologies, the information technology company started decades earlier by Michael Gulban and taken over by son Jeremy in 2008. Immersed in the technology world, Jeremy Gulban has said he grew uncomfortable with Big Tech’s domination of the flow of information, so he decided to build a chain of local outlets from the ground up.
Soon, he was making headlines for how quickly CherryRoad was buying small-town newspapers around the country.
But is this aggressive approach paying off? In this conversation, conducted on a video call and edited for length and clarity, Gulban reflects on what has gone right and wrong so far and what needs to happen to fulfill his dream of creating a thriving network of community papers that changes the way much of the country gets its news.
Mark Caro: What do you know now that you didn’t know then when you were buying your first paper?
Jeremy Gulban: How tough this would be? (laughs) I probably didn’t know how much some people in the community really care about having a local newspaper. And I probably didn’t know that it’s not as many as it needs to be to be really sustainable going forward. But there are just a lot of people that are very passionate about this, both in terms of community supporters but also people who work in the industry. It’s a business, but it’s also a cause in a lot of ways. But I feel like there’s not enough people who do feel that way, and we have to get more people to feel that way.
Caro: Is it a matter of not enough people caring about it or not enough people getting in the mindset of, “I’m supposed to pay for news and not just get everything free off the internet”?
Gulban: I think it’s probably the latter. The last month I’ve gone to a bunch of markets and done these community meetings, and in some places we got really good turnouts, and other places we got a handful of people. But those are the people that really care. Those are the people that go out of their way to meet with me and hear what we’re doing and participate. But it’s usually an older crowd. Newspapers cater to an older audience, people who grew up getting their news and paying for it, and we just have a really, really hard time getting younger people to pay for news.
Caro: What’s the split of your readership between print and digital?
Gulban: It’s probably like 80% print, which is higher than most and certainly higher than we would like it to be. But we inherited very little digital presence in a lot of these markets, and a lot of these communities are rural. The internet is still not great, so you just get a more print-centric audience. And they’re weekly too. I think a weekly paper is a little bit more conducive to a print product than a daily paper would be.
Caro: Does the business model support continuing to do print, or are you trying to transition readers to digital?
Gulban: When your print subscribers drop below a thousand, it becomes very economically difficult to do a printed product. And most of our markets are probably below a thousand, so we’ve come up with this new concept of using a digital printer that’s more locally focused to do a print product. Instead of a broadsheet, it’s going to be a tabloid. The thought is that we can very economically put out 300, 400, 500 of those copies a week, which gives us more runway on our print product to continue to try to get people to engage digitally.
Caro: How do you deliver the papers?
Gulban: A hundred percent through the mail. A lot of our papers are printed in our plant in Hutchinson, Kansas, and then trucked to Texas, for example, or Colorado or Missouri, to the local markets, dropped to the local post offices, where they’re then distributed. Then, for single-copy sales, we take them around to local stores.
Caro: Do you feel like you’ve figured out a business model that works, and it’s just a matter of executing it, or are you still figuring it out?
Gulban: I think we’ve got a good model that works, and we’re executing well in a third of our markets. In the other two-thirds, we’re not executing it very well. I think the model is we need a subscriber base. It needs to be about 15 to 20% of the households that are paying subscribers, whether print or digital, especially under this new model where we can really be variable with our printing costs. Then we need to engage with advertisers, probably around special-themed editions like a graduation section or a fall sports preview or county fair edition, because that’s where advertisers want to advertise.
We’ve centralized a lot of different costs. We’re trying to be as economical as possible. We want to spend money on reporters and editors in the field, not on doing back-office functions that we can do more efficiently in a centralized way. If we do all that, it works.
Read the full interview here.
