4 7
Deadline Friday for special award nominations
Guest Column: Reasons to bet on print By Kevin Slimp
Arkansas Press Association
Publisher Weekly Vol. 16 | No. 23 | Thursday, June 10, 2021 | Serving Press and State Since 1873
New Jersey-based tech company buys Arkansas newspapers The CEO of a New Jersey technology company is the new publisher of four weekly community newspapers in Arkansas. No, really. He is. And he’s pretty proficient in explaining why, as that’s the question most often asked of Jeremy Gulban lately. Gulban heads Parsippany, New Jerseybased CherryRoad Technologies, which provides software and cloud services, mostly to local government entities and state agencies across the country. He also leads CherryRoad Media Inc., which just this month finalized the purchase of the Flippin Mountaineer Echo, the Marshall Mountain Wave, the Pocahontas Star Herald and the Clay County Courier in Corning. The Arkansas acquisitions come a few months after Gulban’s company purchased its first newspaper in the rural Minnesota community of Grand Marais. “We made a decision late last year to look at the local newspaper industry, because we felt there was a need for an infusion of technology from a supportive side as opposed to a competitive side,” Gulban said in a telephone interview this week. “ … As a company, we have a lot of technology tools and platforms that we’ve built, and we want to bring them to the newspaper to improve the digital experience.” Gulban’s been asked plenty in Minnesota about his plans for the Cook County News Herald in that state, acknowledging that readers and others in the community are apprehensive about potential changes when a tech company buys a newspaper. He expects, and welcomes, the same kind
Jeremy Gulban (right), new publisher of the Flippin Mountaineer Echo, is pictured with the newspaper’s editor, Robert Lyons (left) and its former owner, Dale Estes.
of scrutiny in Arkansas. He has assured readers in both states that he’s committed to a printed newspaper. “We want to keep printing the paper because we recognize that’s what makes it a newspaper,” Gulban said. “There are people that want to put it in their hands and read it. “We want to cover local topics and keep printing local news.” Gulban’s expectations are to improve the newspapers’ online presence by expanding online services through his
technology company. One example would be the creation of an online marketplace managed by the newspaper. “There are a lot of features of technology being used to compete against the newspaper, and we wanted to use our technology to bring them into the newspaper,” he explained. Gulban targeted the Flippin and Marshall newspapers for purchase because the communities rely on tourism, much like at his property in Minnesota. He learned from newspaper broker Lewis Floyd that the Pocahontas and Corning newspapers Continued on Page 2