CherryRoad Media continues its expansion, promises not to mine rural papers for profit

CherryRoad Media, a division of New Jersey-based tech company CherryRoad Technologies, has expanded its newspaper holdings recently, including several Gannett Co. papers in Texas and Oklahoma. The company also revived a Minnesota rural weekly, the Lake County Press, that folded in 2020. 

Since 2020, CherryRoad has been on a "newspaper buying spree, largely in the Midwest and the South," and now owns 49 papers in 10 states, Pat Borzi reports for MinnPost. 

CherryRoad CEO Jeremy Gulban told Borzi, the company plans to invest in local news, not mine it for profits, which Borzi notes is "a refreshing change from the shark-tank world of corporate journalism."

"As I’ve gotten more involved with it, I have really come to realize how [important to] a small community the newspaper really is," Gulban told Borzi. "When you go out into these smaller, rural communities, there really is no other real source of news. People really do count on the local newspaper to provide that. It’s really an institution in the community."

Gulban said he's also learned that "it takes a tremendous amount of attention to detail to run these smaller newspapers, and I think bigger companies aren’t necessarily suited for that. We are, because we’re a small organization. We’re more nimble. We’re more able to react. The number of calls I get every day from the various small papers that we have that require a response, it’s very hard for a large organization to handle something like that," Borzi reports.