Jeremy Gulban

REGIONAL— A New Jersey-based media company has acquired two more northeastern Minnesota newspapers. Cherry Road Media, which now owns 94 newspapers across 18 states, has purchased the Cook News-Herald and the Tower News from owner Edna Albertson.
Albertson had been running the two papers for years with her husband Gary, who died last year. The future of the papers had been uncertain since his passing.
Cherry Road CEO Jeremy Gulban has been bullish on the future of small market newspapers since he bought the Cook County News-Herald in Grand Marais several years ago. It was his first venture into the newspaper business and it proved a successful start. Ever since, he’s been focused on buying small papers and opening new ones in markets like Two Harbors and International Falls, that had seen long-established newspapers fold in recent years.
“I still think there is a need for that local community news,” said Gulban. “Our challenge is getting people to pay for it.”
Gulban sees technology as a way to help small newspapers operate more efficiently and he’s leveraging his background as the CEO of Cherry Road Technologies to implement new approaches to newspaper production and printing. He sees the Cook News-Herald printing plant as an opportunity to shift to digital printing, which he said is far more efficient for tabloid-sized newspapers with limited press runs. “A lot of our runs are under 1,000, so that’s pretty inefficient for a web press,” Gulban noted. Gulban launched his first digital printing facility just last week down in Arkansas, where he owns five small newspapers.
Since Gulban now owns at least five newspapers in northeastern Minnesota, he plans to consolidate printing at the Cook facility. Currently, Cherry Road’s northeastern Minnesota papers, which include the Rainy Lake Gazette, the Lake County Press, and the Cook County News-Herald, are printed at Cherry Road’s plant in Slayton, located in far southwestern Minnesota. Gulban said he has a new digital printing machine on order for the Slayton facility and depending on how it works out, he’ll look at bringing a similar machine to Cook, perhaps as early as next month. In the meantime, both the Cook News-Herald and the Tower News will be printed in Slayton.
The ramshackle building that currently houses the Tower News is not part of Gulban’s plan and is now up for sale. Gulban said he doesn’t intend to keep the property and likely won’t maintain an office in Tower. The Tower News has experienced a sharp decline in circulation in recent years, with the newspaper’s most recent publisher’s statement showing just 275 paid subscribers.
The look of the two newspapers is expected to change fairly dramatically in the near future, and will likely include a shift to color. In addition to planned printing upgrades, Gulban is planning a shift to an automated form of page layout which will have set templates that will be automatically filled with content, photos, and ads. The ad production and layout of the two papers won’t be done locally. That work is handled by a centralized facility that serves Cherry Road’s many newspapers.