The news about the news business has been so bleak for so long, I hesitate to amplify something good for fear of jinxing it. Maybe it’s the Vikings fan in me.
But I’ll just say it. Two weekly newspapers launched in the central Minnesota towns of Hutchinson and Litchfield this summer and the subscriber numbers look really good.
The papers, The Hutchinson Station and The Litchfield Rail, were started by CherryRoad Media, a New Jersey-based company that says it is committed to building up local news operations rather than stripping them down for cash. Since 2020, CherryRoad has purchased or launched a dozen newspapers in Minnesota communities. The papers in Hutchinson and Litchfield take the place of longtime publications that closed in April.
“In Hutchinson, we have over 1,700 paid [print] subscribers. In Litchfield, we have over 1,000, which we’re very happy with relative to a lot of small weekly newspapers. Those are great numbers in this day and age,” Jeremy Gulban, CEO of CherryRoad, told me last week. “On the advertising side, we’ve gotten a lot of advertisers back.”
With both papers, the company started by distributing them free to every house in their respective counties for a few weeks, then asked people to subscribe. “We’ve continued to do a shopper, which is a free distribution product that goes to every house,” Gulban said, adding that he doesn’t think the shopper model is effective. “We’ve got to move away from that as time goes on,” he said.
The front page of a recent edition of the Hutchinson Station, a new weekly newspaper in Hutchinson, Minn. started by CherryRoad Media.
I heard about CherryRoad from Benjamin Toff, a journalism professor at the University of Minnesota who, along with colleagues, is breathing new life into its Minnesota Journalism Center. Late last month, they produced a report called Minnesota’s Local News Ecosystem that found the state has lost 12% of its local news outlets since 2018, or 76 out of 602.
Most of those were small town newspapers, though some were radio and TV stations that gave up news broadcasting. For every two outlets that closed, however, a new one opened. That means there have been 38 newspapers and digital sites created in Minnesota since 2018. One example is the Root River Current, which formed as a nonprofit news organization two years ago to serve residents of Fillmore County in the state’s southeast corner.
“As we’ve been relaunching the journalism center, we’ve been hearing from more and more people who are, in some cases, non-journalists or people who are just frustrated by there no longer being a source of information in their community. They want to start something,” Toff said.
