This owner thinks newspapers are better off diminished than dead

Is any newspaper better than a news desert? Steve Strickbine thinks the answer to that question is yes.

I recently published a story, “National Trust for Local News sells 21 newspapers to a company with a history of gutting local news outlets.” Strickbine, founder and president of the Arizona-based group that acquired the local publications, didn’t respond to my request for comment before publication, but after the story came out, he got in touch. He didn’t challenge the pattern of cuts and reductions outlined in the piece, but didn’t like being associated with “gutting” and “devastating” local newsrooms.

Many of the local newspapers he acquired, he said, would have folded without his intervention.

It’s rare, in my experience, to hear directly from newspaper owners making cuts to local newsrooms. Hedge funds and private equity firms control more than half of the daily newspapers in the U.S. and owners like Alden Global Capital have hollowed-out local newsrooms for decades, almost never going on the record to talk about the cuts. When I asked Strickbine for an interview, however, he agreed to speak the next day.

Our back-and-forth over “gutted” is not just semantics. And it’s not only ego that makes Strickbine believe he’s the good guy in this story. What started as a single weekly newspaper in Scottsdale, Arizona has grown into a profitable network with more than 60 local newspapers. As I noted when first reviewing the Times Media Group acquisitions, nearly all of the distressed local news publications Strickbine has purchased remain open. It’s a notable accomplishment. After all, more than a third of local newspapers in the U.S. have closed in the last 20 years, including more than 100 in 2024.

Strickbine believes that local newspapers are worth saving, even if they’re no longer able to act as watchdogs or sustain a full newsroom. He is committed to a free, advertising-supported business model. You may not agree with Strickbine’s vision for local news. I do not. But I’ve never interviewed a newspaper owner so willing to defend his record and speak as plainly about what keeping the lights on actually looks like in many local communities.

Times Media Group has about 60 full-time journalists, Strickbine said. It also paid 218 freelance contributors in March. With more than 60 newspapers in the group, that’s a little less than one full-time journalist per newspaper. The National Trust for Local News, which has struggled to reconcile its promises to save local newspapers with the on-the-ground realities, will have a similar ratio across its remaining newspapers in Colorado: seven reporters and one editor across seven newspapers.

Strickbine described a method of “platooning” across his local newspapers in which reporters from areas having “a slow news week” contribute coverage to other publications. There are also two executive editors who edit across dozens and dozens of outlets in Times Media Group — often from hundreds of miles away.

“It’s just kind of the way it is. Do we have the watchdog role? Can we do that now in all these areas? No. I think that’s obvious,” Strickbine said. “We have to just manage those resources well and really try to do our best.”

It’s a pragmatic approach that nevertheless leaves local communities in a strange limbo. The local newspaper still publishes with events and local happenings, but without a newsroom equipped to hold power accountable. If many of the community newspapers owned by Times Media Group aren’t able to fill that critical local watchdog role, what exactly is being preserved?

I asked Strickbine about the unbylined pieces I’d noticed on most of the homepages of the newspapers he owns. The unbylined pieces are typically reworked press releases, he said.

Strickbine also brought up the sponsored content that appears in his newspapers. He sees local businesses as a constituency alongside readers.

“Part of business discipline is also building packages and remaining of value to the communities we serve — to the business communities we serve,” Strickbine said. “That doesn’t mean going out and doing stories about them. It means giving them access to have a story on our website that we cordon off under, like, recommended reading.”

Strickbine is committed to publishing online without a paywall, he said. Although Times Media Group news sites include “support local journalism” donation buttons, he confirmed his business model is chiefly advertising.

Just 15% of Americans pay for local news. When Strickbine acquired Acorn Newspapers in 2023, he removed the paywall that was up across the five weekly newspapers even though it was bringing in a “fairly significant” amount of revenue, he said.

“I’m willing to say democratizing this — what we produce — is critically important to me,” Strickbine said. “When we wall that off and charge somebody $15 a month, we are walling it off from the 70% of the people in the community who don’t feel they need to pay for that, or they’re just not willing to. It’s not good for the paper [and] it’s not good for the businesses.”

At one point in our conversation, Strickbine pushed back on the way I’d characterized a group of newspapers in Tucson going from 5 full-time staffers to one person writing for seven publications. I asked him what journalism he was proud to have published in Tucson in the last year. He couldn’t name any particular pieces. “I don’t get to see all these papers,” he acknowledged.

Strickbine believes that these local publications would not exist without his cuts and ownership. His argument is that the stripped-down local outlets are better than nothing and critics pushing for fewer cuts are out of touch with the brutal reality of local news economics.

With the Colorado acquisiton, Times Media Group now owns local newspapers in three states and is profitable, even if Strickbine says he’s “not running off with big margins of money.” Strickbine was the one who reached out to the National Trust for Local News, he told me, to offer to buy the group of papers around Denver. He plans to acquire more distressed local newspapers in the future.

“I’ll tell you something about our company that I think you should know: I don’t feel like I’ve got this figured out,” Strickbine said. “I just think my heart’s in the right place.”