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‘I’m a Twenty-Five-Year-Old Who Just Bought My Local Newspaper’

Columbia Journalism Review · Liz Skalka · last updated

A former intern bought Georgia’s Monticello News. Weeks later, he grew subscriptions by 30 percent.

I’m a twenty-five-year-old who just bought my local newspaper, and here’s my first edition,” Evan Newton posted to his TikTok account this summer. Newton, from rural Monticello, Georgia, had just bought the weekly Monticello News, where he’d previously been an intern, and made himself the editor and publisher. His TikTok announcement soon received more than fifty-six hundred views, well over the paper’s total print circulation, of roughly two thousand across Jasper County. Six weeks in, Newton had managed to grow print and digital subscriptions 30 percent.

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