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.
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