This article was originally published by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and is republished here with permission.
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.
We have grown so fast it’s been very chaotic, but now I feel like we’re kind of catching our breath. We’re able to now kind of roll out some new ideas or just implement things more uniformly across the organization. But in some markets, the community is just done with the newspaper. In Crookston, Minnesota, we had to shut down that paper. For two years we tried to find somebody, couldn’t find anybody. We did a community meeting to try to rally interest around the paper, and three people showed up. At some point you realize this is hopeless, and there’s no point in throwing good money after bad here.
Caro: Is there anything that distinguishes the one-third that’s working from the two-thirds that are still struggling?
Gulban: The people we have there is the No. 1 differentiator. We don’t have any publishers in our organization; we’re very flat. We’re trying to be efficient. We’ve concluded that if we hired someone to be a publisher locally, we couldn’t even generate enough incremental revenue to cover their costs.
So it means our editors have to step up and do more than write stories. They need to be out and about in the community. They need to be an ambassador, the face of the paper, and we need a good salesperson that’s also out and about, can relate to businesses, can help them figure out how to put together campaigns that work for them, that deliver value.
If we have that, then we wind up with good relations with the community, and we’re successful. If we don’t, then we’re really kind of out of sight, out of mind, and we’re just keeping the subscribers we have, but we’re struggling to get new ones, and we’re struggling to sell ads to the businesses.
Caro: Is there a correlation of communities leaning this way or that way politically that tend to do better or worse? Do communities where there’s a higher level of distrust in media tend to be bigger challenges?
Gulban: Not really. Most of our counties that we’re in are 70% Trump, 30% Harris counties, if not higher. I often wonder are our subscribers in the 30%? It’s probably where most of them are, but not necessarily. I’ve had conversations with people who clearly are on one side or the other, but there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between where we’re successful and where we’re not.
Our strongest market is probably in McCall, Idaho, which is a very conservative area, and one of our weaker markets is in Independence, Missouri, which is one of our larger markets, right outside Kansas City; it probably shifted a little bit right in this election but traditionally is a very Democratic area. So it doesn’t seem to correlate to politics at all.
Caro: Have the people on the ground at your various papers had to do more work to build up trust? Is there a growing tide against newspapers, the media and the press?
Gulban: There definitely is. Where we have people that have strong (local) relationships, we don’t face this much. But if we have someone new, or we don’t have someone local who’s strong, who’s out there in the community, there’s definitely more of an element of ‘The media is against me as a political leader.”
Caro: How much editorial oversight do you have with the papers?
Gulban: Me, personally? Not much. We’ve worked to build a stronger structure around that, because I think we were a little too lean there. So we have one person underneath me who’s over all of the editorial organization, and then we’ve added three regional leaders underneath. Then we have some local editors who oversee one or several neighboring publications and then individual people out at each market.
Caro: What are they trying to sort of enforce or encourage among the papers?
Gulban: Part of it’s quality control, to make sure that we’re writing good, solid articles. Part of it’s to drive people to write more articles, because we have a problem of not creating enough of our own content. There’s all these state organizations now, so we put a lot of their content in, and our subscribers are paying us for local stories that we’re writing, so we want more of that.
Caro: Will papers in states like Minnesota share some of each other’s stories to fill the news hole?
Gulban: They do. When I was there last week, (I was) talking with the regional editor about trying to do more of that — not so much just to fill space, but there’s a lot of issues in common across those counties that are neighboring within the state, so (we can do) more regional reporting. One of the things we struggle with, because we are so lean, is doing any sort of in-depth reporting. It takes a while versus just writing a story in a day or two. So by working together, they can parse out the work, work as a team and try to do a more in-depth story about an issue that’s bigger from a regional perspective.
Caro: Do you have rules on political coverage, whether it’s the local sheriff’s race or someone having a meeting locally about a national issue?
Gulban: We try to tell people to stay away from national issues, because there’s plenty of other outlets to go for that, and we’re just going to alienate one side or the other. That’s just the way that it is today. In terms of local, that’s great. They should be covering local political issues. We want them to be fair. We want them to obviously do good journalism with it.
We don’t endorse any candidates at all. I was at this conference, there’s a lot of talk about, as an industry, should we be endorsing more local candidates? Because that’s what helps to really drive relevancy. But for right now, we’ve said we don’t want to be in the business of endorsing candidates. Honestly, I don’t know if we have enough staff to really do it, because to do it right, you really should have a process, you should be very thorough, and you should have multiple people conducting the interviews as an editorial board, which we really don’t have. So we’ll probably stay away from that.
Caro: You’re trying to get onto platforms that are controlled by Big Tech. Has that been an obstacle to what you’re doing?
Gulban: I think it’s an obstacle in general for the industry. I don’t think that they see paying us as part of their business model, so they’re relying on our content without paying us for it. I don’t think that can go on forever. My fear is that they don’t even think that they will need that in the long run, because everybody just putting whatever they want on social media platforms will create news that they will use to then propagate their AI engines. So I have a real concern that we’re being used right now in the short term but won’t be needed in the long term. I think that’s a big problem.
We have not engaged with any of them around any sort of licensing arrangements or anything like that, probably because I think our markets are too small so far to really be of interest. There is an opportunity that we’re looking at to maybe engage with one of these platforms, one that’s a smaller kind of up-and-coming one that has a little bit different business model. But we’ve been very wary. I don’t think they’re good business partners.
Caro: So much of social media now is depressing the views for news, so it becomes trickier to promote your work beyond your own platform.
Gulban: It does. I guess maybe we’re a little more insulated from that because we are so print-centric still. It’s not impacting us as much as others, but eventually that’ll become a problem, because younger people are not going to subscribe to a printed newspaper, period, right? They’re going to be digital subscribers, and if you can’t get them to engage in their social channels, then it’s going to be very hard to pull them in as a subscriber.
Caro: Still, your business model isn’t to have your stories go viral; it’s to be read by the people in your communities.
Gulban: We’re fully in on a subscription-based model. All this talk about clicks, I don’t think that means anything. I think it’s about getting people to pay you a recurring revenue stream, which is what funds your news gathering.
Caro: How is generative AI affecting what you’re doing?
Gulban: Right now for us, it’s probably not, but for others, I think it is. I think that we can use it to be more efficient, but I have concerns about others coming in with an AI product that’s just scraping a bunch of information off the web and spitting it out as a newsletter. I have probably even more grave concerns for us as an industry saying, “Well, we should just do the same thing.” Because then what is the value of the product we’re asking people to pay for? I think we have to differentiate that we have real people really reporting the news, not just grabbing a bunch of stuff that may or may not be too accurate and spinning it back out as news.
But again, we’re print-centric, and our markets have such little digital engagement that we really haven’t been touched much by this yet. But obviously it’s coming in the future.
Caro: Do you have a set of AI guidelines for CherryRoad?
Gulban: Well, our original guidelines, which are technically still in effect, were: Don’t use it ever for anything. We’re in the process of revising that to talk about how to use it. And I’m not naive enough to think that people aren’t using it anyway, in spite of what we’ve told them.
Caro: Is there an optimal place you’re trying to get with CherryRoad, either in terms of the number of outlets you have or how big you’re going to get? Or is it more about bolstering what you have and getting those percentages up in that two-thirds of the ones you already own?
Gulban: That’s the debate we’re having every day right now, because there are so many opportunities to grow and acquire and expand even more. But I don’t know if we should. Should we make what we have work? If we’re good in a third of the places, can we get that to two-thirds of the places where we’re performing well and we’ve implemented the model before we add more onto it? I think so much of this business today is about scale and having enough locations to cover the centralized cost that you need to run, and we don’t have enough today. Either we have to make the ones we have produce more profit margin to cover it, or we need to have more of them. So it’s a debate. I truly don’t know what the right answer is, sitting here today.
Caro: What have you learned from talking with other people in the local news industry? What kind of information sharing has benefited you?
Gulban: Tons of information sharing goes on. From the very first day that I went to a conference, people have been so great about sharing ideas, saying, “Call me anytime. We’ll help you.” Totally different than the technology world, where everything was very competitive, and you never shared anything with anybody. Here it’s been completely collaborative.
We obviously got a lot of our papers from Gannett, and we continue to have a great relationship with them in terms of them sharing information with us and sharing our information with them about what we’ve learned as we’ve tried to rebuild some of those markets. Hearst has been fantastic. They shared with us their entire strategy for how to gain digital subscribers, which has been great. We’ve started to implement that over the last six months, and it’s helped us a lot in terms of getting more subscribers. And then I have countless other people that I’ve met that I can call anytime and ask them their advice or what they’re doing around any specific issue.
The industry is very collaborative and working very well together to try to solve problems like how do we engage with a Big Tech? What do we need Congress to do to help us? I put a lot of time into those types of situations as well, going to D.C. with others and trying to advocate for the industry.
Caro: I wrote a story about Massachusetts weeklies, so many of which had been bought up by GateHouse/Gannett, and they ended up getting rid of a lot of local reporters and regionalizing everything so that a local paper might have no stories about anything within 40 miles. Do you look at the Gannett model as something you’re trying to avoid, or were there some pieces worth emulating?
Gulban: I’ve thought a lot about this. They obviously cut a lot of costs as their model. Were they cutting ahead of the curve of revenue declines, or did their cuts cause the revenue decline? I tend to think now that they were cutting ahead of the inevitable decline in a lot of these markets. Where I think they definitely went too far was they took out too much of the editorial staff to be able to produce quality content.
I’ll give you a great example. When we took over a lot of those markets, they had moved all of the design and ad-building work to their centralized teams, and we tried to go the other way. We hired a bunch of designers. We tried to do it ourselves. We found that there’s no efficiency in that, so we wound up going back to them and outsourcing all of our design and ad-building work back to Gannett, which is what we should have done on day one.
I look at something like that, and I say they were doing it right the way they were doing it. We’ve continued to centralize as much as we possibly can. They’ve consolidated a lot of their printing into less facilities. We’ve gone even further, and we’ve consolidated almost all of our printing into our three plants around the country. They were hauling long distances. We’re hauling even longer distances than they are right now. So I think you have to do that. I think that aspect of their efficiency was good. I think you need to still have people in the market reporting, and if you don’t, you don’t have a quality product that you get people to pay for.
Caro: What are the best things to centralize versus localize?
Gulban: Everything but sales and editorial should be centralized. In terms of printing now, we’re talking about going back the other way, where, if we have short runs in remote locations, we want to use this digital concept to print them locally to eliminate the hauling. But other than that, everything else should be centralized: all of the design, all of the processing of legal notices, all of the circulation and customer service, all of the finance, accounting, billing, functions like that.
Caro: How big of an issue is legal notices?
Gulban: It’s a big issue, and it’s a constant threat. If you take away legal notices from a lot of these papers, they’re not viable. I’m on the board of the Arkansas Press Association, so we’ve gone through some real fights over the last several years to try to keep legal notices in Arkansas. I look at our markets there, and it would be very tough to be viable without that revenue. So it’s critically important, but I also think it’s important to make the government put something out there in an independent source that allows people to see what’s going on.
Caro: Are you in favor of legal notices going to online-only outlets?
Gulban: No, I’m not. I know what governments want to do. They want to not do legal notices at all. They want to just say, “We’re putting it on our website.” So if we go and say, “You can put it on a website,” it’s the first step to getting to that outcome.
Caro: A Wall Street Journal story about you ends on this quote: “This guy, he’s legit. He wants to save small newspapers. It’s kind of crazy. I don’t know if he can do it.” Can you?
Gulban: (Laughs) I think we can do it in some places. The question is, can we do it everywhere? I think what’s unique about us is that we’re doing this in markets that are too small for other organizations to really be willing to put their time and energy into making it work. So if we don’t figure this out, then what does that say to those smaller markets? Then newspapers will only exist in the top X number of counties, and I just don’t think that’s a good solution. I’ve asked myself that same question many a night, and I fall back on we are doing it in a third of our markets, so the question now is how do we do it in the rest of them?
Caro: What drove you to do all this? And is that still the drive?
Gulban: My drive was that I felt it was unacceptable for a handful of Big Tech companies to control all the information, all the commerce in the country, and I probably feel that way more than ever today. So that was the driver, and then it kind of took on a life of its own, honestly, as we went through this. The vision was that newspapers were the alternative to that, because they were local in every single county in the country. And rather than having four companies from the top, you would have 5,000 organizations in every county doing this, and they would all collaborate, and there would be some sort of network.
I haven’t been able to pull that off yet or even think about that, but that’s still where I would like to take it to. I would like to say that we could make this work. We can make this sustainable. No one’s going to get wildly rich doing this like people did 30 years ago, but I think there’s something here that could be made at least mildly profitable. And then could we all work together and figure out a way to link the newspaper in every county into some sort of network that competed against whatever Big Tech was doing.
Caro: What would you now tell five-years-ago-Jeremy if you could?
Gulban: “This will be a lot harder than you think it will be.” The question that I ask myself a lot is, did we grow too fast, and would we have been better off to grow slower? And I don’t know the answer to that.
I think in the short term it would have been less painful. We probably would be further along with what we’re doing. But in the longer run, we wouldn’t have created the buzz that we did. I probably wouldn’t be talking to you right now if we had grown more slowly, and that really has helped to get the word out of what we’re trying to do.
Because ultimately, I think there’s a bigger thing here of all of these organizations figuring this out together, and if we didn’t grow that fast, we probably wouldn’t have that momentum towards that.
