It’s late for a New Year’s column but I want to share the 2025 outlook I’ve heard from several local newspaper publishers.
These conversations inform columns I write about the local journalism crisis and the need to find solutions, before it’s too late to save the small businesses providing America’s essential, local reporting.
Most of the publishers I talked to are concerned about advertising that leveled off or declined in late 2024 and hasn’t picked up much in 2025.
Several said readers remain loyal, with subscription levels holding steady and strong community support, despite the sturm and drang at the national level about trust in media, bias and raging partisanship.
Growing digital subscriptions is the big hope and may offset weakness in other parts of the business.
But overall, 2025 looks extraordinarily challenging. I wish I was as hopeful as these publishers, and remain convinced that the industry needs public support to prevent further job losses and closures.
Long term, the industry must find ways to get fairly compensated by tech platforms profiting from its work.
That’s all needed to regrow newsrooms, improve the product and help persuade future generations to read and pay for the local journalism that’s necessary for a healthy democracy.
I spoke with publishers, including those of daily and weekly newspapers in Washington and Oregon, and the owner of a New Jersey-based company publishing 92 papers with a combined 600 employees.
“Honestly, we ended the year pretty significantly under advertising revenue. I feel that just continues to be a challenge,” said Ben Campbell, publisher and co-owner of The Columbian daily newspaper in Vancouver. “I don’t know if it’s the economy or the election had anything to do with it, but I think a lot of businesses down here were kind of in a holding pattern.”
A few advertisers resumed spending in January, though, and “my outlook for this year is, it’s pretty optimistic,” Campbell said.
“Like, we grew our digital subscriptions by 15% last year and our plan is to grow another 15 to 20% this year, so that’s definitely trending in the right direction,” he said.
CherryRoad Media, the New Jersey-based publisher, lost 8% of its subscribers through 2024, owner Jeremy Gulban told me.
Yet price increases helped keep revenue flat and digital subscriptions are growing — “just not as fast as we would like,” Gulban said.
“I’m not pessimistic on that piece of it because I think if we put out a good product, and we really promote it … we can get that number up,” he said.
At the News-Register, an independent paper serving Oregon’s Yamhill County, “we’re kind of treading water in our company,” Jeb Bladine, president and publisher, told me.
The McMinnville paper’s circulation held steady over the last five years, at around 5,500, even though the paper charges more than some of its peers. It publishes three days a week — one print edition and two electronic editions.
That in turn helps the News-Register maintain a relatively large newsroom. With around 10 people, it’s larger than any of Oregon’s daily newspapers, other than The Oregonian, Bladine said.
The News-Register is among the few independent papers still operating a printing facility. That saw business pick up last year as other presses around the state closed.
The paper is also pursuing new models of community support and hired a person to do outreach.
That employee’s message to local businesses will be that “we understand how everything’s changed,” Bladine said, “but, you know, we’ve all got to decide whether we want to have a community newspaper and an independent community newspaper.”
For local businesses wanting to help, the News-Register created a membership program. They make a monthly contribution and receive a branding campaign and lower ad rate.
The paper also raised $17,000 from community members to support a “public access” team in the newsroom, working on things like public records and open public meetings.
Bladine is now working with a group of Oregon publishers to develop a nonprofit to help others pursue community support and other new revenue models. He’s also involved in efforts to find support through legislation, including a state proposal to require tech giants to pay online news providers.
As with all small businesses and consumers, rising costs are a problem, threatening many local publishers’ toehold on stability.
But there’s little room to reduce costs further, particularly at lean-running operations like CherryRoad.
“We don’t have a lot of room to cut,” Gulban said, explaining that it’s already found efficiencies in printing, standardizing the product and centralizing a lot of business functions.
“There’s probably a little bit more efficiency we could gain there but at some point we’ve got to get people to pay for the product,” he said. “Otherwise it just doesn’t work.”
Gulban, a software entrepreneur, started acquiring papers in 2020, including papers spun out of the giant Gannett chain. His publishing business has yet to be profitable, but he’s undeterred.
“We’re fine, overall,” he said. “It’s just at some point we need to make this thing work. We need to make a profit, as does every business, and even if you’re not-for-profit you still need to be cash-flow positive.”
So 2022 and 2023 were about building scale and 2024 was a year of finding efficiencies and sorting out the business. The focus in 2025 will be revenue growth, he said.
That could be complicated by tariffs on newsprint that’s largely sourced from Canada.
Although paused for now, President Donald Trump’s threat to add a 25% tariff on Canadian products could be the death knell for some local newspapers and would accelerate others’ plans to reduce or eliminate print editions.
“If we have to charge our commercial printing customers 25% more, how many of them are just going to go out of business because they can’t afford it?” Gulban said.
Gulban laid out the total situation in a recent call with his newsrooms.
The bad news he shared is that “we have all these issues overall as an industry,” he said.
“But the good news is, if you guys put out a good product that our local consumers will pay for, and we get to around 15% of local households paying to subscribe, then we don’t have a problem,” he said. “So this, we can solve this ourselves, if we put out a good product and we promote and we get people to subscribe to it.”
