Why The Leominster Champion Failed

CherryRoad Media’s recent announcement that it has officially closed The Leominster Champion marks the end of a long decline for the once-proud community newspaper. In truth, the Champion had already stopped publishing new content by July 2024, quietly fading out over the summer. By that time, my own outlet – News Link Live: Massachusetts’ Subscription Free Digital Newspaper – was well into its third year of operation and rapidly filling the local news void. In fact, since our launch in February 2022, News Link Live has had 191,173 visitors from Leominster alone (about 68,000 per year), making Leominster our strongest audience base, it’s also where the publication is based. As the publisher of News Link Live, I witnessed first-hand why the Champion couldn’t survive in today’s media climate. From distant corporate ownership and perpetual financial woes to an outdated subscription model, the Champion’s fate was sealed by forces that a new approach to local news has managed to overcome.

Distant Ownership and Lost Community Connection

One of the fundamental problems facing The Leominster Champion in its final years was the lack of local ownership and management. Once a community-rooted newspaper, the Champion became caught in the wave of corporate media consolidation—first under Gannett, a national publishing conglomerate, and later under CherryRoad Media, a New Jersey-based company that owns dozens of small newspapers across 12 states.

As journalism professor and media analyst Dan Kennedy has observed, “There’s no substitute for local ownership” when it comes to sustaining strong local journalism. By the time the Champion ceased publication, its ownership was remote, and editorial decisions were being made by people with no day-to-day connection to Leominster. While CherryRoad may have been well-intentioned, it was managing the Champion as one title among many—too far removed to respond to the community’s needs in real time.

By contrast, News Link Live is based in Leominster and independently run. It was created to serve the city and its surrounding communities with a focus on regional accountability, responsiveness, and transparency. Being locally embedded enables a hands-on, data-driven approach that distant corporate publishers typically can’t replicate. For example, by analyzing reader engagement, I discovered that audiences in nearby Clinton were more drawn to Leominster news than to coverage of their own town—an unexpected pattern a remote owner would likely overlook. That kind of nuanced understanding comes from being present and invested in the region, not managing it from afar. The Champion’s corporate managers, however well-meaning, couldn’t match the speed, adaptability, or local awareness that a truly community-based outlet can provide.

Financially Unsustainable from Day One

Even more fatal was the Champion’s inability to achieve financial sustainability. CherryRoad’s own statement on closing the paper was frank about this: “Since purchasing The Leominster Champion, CherryRoad Media has been unable to avoid financial losses every month. The paper was losing money when we bought it, and it continued to do so…we do not have a path forward to sustainability.” In other words, the Champion bled red ink continuously, and even a tech-oriented publisher like CherryRoad could not reverse that trend. CherryRoad had swooped in to save the Champion (and three sister weeklies) from Gannett in late 2022, touting itself as a savior of community journalists. Yet despite trimming costs and trying to shore up operations, the Champion struggled to “find its footing” and never returned to profitability.

Why was the Champion so financially untenable? Part of the answer lies in the broader state of local print media economics. Gannett (the previous owner) had already gutted many local newsrooms in cost-cutting waves. According to the Neiman Lab, after a massive merger in 2019, Gannett shuttered or sold off hundreds of newspapers nationwide and slashed staff, including closing 24 weekly papers in the Boston area in 2022 alone. The Leominster Champion narrowly avoided that cull only by being sold to CherryRoad. But the paper that CherryRoad inherited was a stripped-down operation with a vanishing advertising base. Longtime advertisers had moved to digital platforms; readers and classifieds had migrated to Facebook and Craigslist. The Champion’s print circulation and ad revenue simply could not cover the costs of even a skeleton newsroom, printing, and distribution.

Several Massachusetts weeklies (e.g. the Newton Tab, Waltham News Tribune, and Watertown Tab), were shuttered or merged into digital-only publications in 2023 as Gannett cut costs, according to Boston.com. The Leominster Champion was similarly a casualty of this industry-wide contraction when it could not find a sustainable business model.

CherryRoad did what it could, even launching a revamped Champion website, but losses kept piling up. Ultimately, the company had to “come to terms with the fact” that there was “no path forward to sustainability.” In essence, a weekly paper with shrinking print ads and low digital revenue was not a viable business in 2024. The Champion’s closure is sadly emblematic of many local papers that have folded for economic reasons: there just weren’t enough dollars coming in to pay even a small staff and the bills.

The Subscription Model: A Proven Failure

Another major reason the Champion failed is that it was operating on an outdated subscription-based model that no longer works in the digital era. The paper’s website prominently urged readers to “Subscribe,” and much of its content was behind pay walls or tied to print subscriptions. But in 2025, few people are willing to pay for access to a small local weekly’s content – not when so much news is available free online.

Local news has to be free; the subscription model is a proven failure in local journalism. This is a core philosophy of News Link Live, and our growth numbers bear it out. We never put our news behind a paywall or required a paid subscription. Instead, we made it free and easy for anyone to read, share, and engage. As a result, we reached a far wider audience than a paywalled site ever could.

People today will subscribe to Netflix or Spotify – platforms that offer vast libraries of content or utility – but they will not subscribe to a small-town newspaper website for a handful of articles. The Champion struggled to get enough digital subscribers to matter, and its print subscriber base was literally aging out. (The median age of print newspaper readers is well over 50.) Even CherryRoad’s CEO Jeremy Gulban acknowledged at the time of purchase that these papers were “suffering the brunt of the digital age by losing subscriptions.” That loss of subscribers is a one-way street: once readers grow accustomed to getting news free from other sources, they don’t return to paying $30 or $50 a year for a weekly paper with limited content.

News Link Live took the opposite approach: grow first, monetize later. By removing the friction of subscription, we amassed a large audience quickly – which then opened up other revenue options (more on that later). The Champion, bound to an old subscription model, could never grow its audience enough; its “narrow subscriber base” was a dead end while we focused on reaching “as many engaged readers as possible” for free. In today’s digital marketplace, audience attention is the currency, not subscription fees.

How Media Consolidation Broke Local News

To truly understand the Champion’s fate, one must consider the historical context of media consolidation that set the stage. A pivotal moment was the Telecommunications Act of 1996 under the Clinton administration, which dramatically deregulated media ownership. This bipartisan law “removed many barriers to consolidation” and allowed media companies to acquire one another far more freely. In the aftermath, giant corporations went on a buying spree of local newspapers, TV, and radio stations. The act “opened the floodgates on mergers,” letting big conglomerates “buy up thousands of media outlets across the country, increasing their monopoly on the flow of information,” truthout.org reported. Community newspapers that used to be independently owned were rapidly absorbed into large chains.

Local newspapers, too, have been stung by these deregulations. In the decades since 1996, companies like Gannett, GateHouse, and others swallowed up local papers in pursuit of economies of scale. The Leominster Champion was one small example: it became just one title among hundreds in a corporate portfolio. Initially it was owned by GateHouse Media (which merged into Gannett), and later passed to CherryRoad’s growing chain. This consolidation weakened the Champion’s ties to the community and subjected it to the financial priorities of distant owners. The bond of community ownership was broken. Decisions about layoffs, budgets, and even whether to continue publishing were based on corporate spreadsheets rather than local needs. The Champion barely survived Gannett’s 2022 culling of Massachusetts weeklies only because CherryRoad saw a chance to experiment with it, according to the Nieman Lab. But after another two years of losses, even that chain had to prioritize its bottom line.

Media consolidation doesn’t only affect newspapers’ ownership – it also erodes their quality and distinctiveness. When one company runs dozens of papers, there’s a temptation to centralize content production (sharing generic stories or using syndicated material) instead of investing in original local reporting. Readers notice this. They see less truly local news and more filler, and thus have even less reason to pay for the paper. It’s a vicious cycle largely fueled by the consolidation trend unleashed in the ’90s. We should remember that this was not an inevitability; it was a policy choice. And it’s had devastating impacts on the diversity of local media voices in communities like Leominster. In my view, the Champion’s failure is as much a policy story as a business story – it’s a product of a media ecosystem that valued scale and cost-cutting over community service.

In the Internet Age, a Building Won’t Save You

Another sign of the times: physical newspaper offices no longer matter like they once did. There was an era when a local paper’s downtown office – with a big sign, an open door for walk-ins, and reporters at desks – was a fixture of civic life. But today, investing in a bricks-and-mortar newsroom offers little ROI for local news. Even the big players have recognized this. Gannett, for example, has been closing its local newsrooms and shifting staff to remote work, saying it prefers to “invest more in our people and technology – rather than real estate,” according to boston.com. In early 2024, six of Gannett’s Massachusetts newspapers (including some daily papers) ditched their physical newsrooms entirely to cut costs. The message is clear: you don’t need a street-front office to produce journalism in the digital era.

When CherryRoad took over the Champion, it did not reopen any local office in Leominster (to my knowledge, the staff operated remotely or from a centralized location). That was probably a wise decision – why pay rent and utilities when most interactions with readers and advertisers are now online? News Link Live, for one, has zero physical overhead: my “newsroom” is basically a laptop, a website, and a gigantic yoga mat I write from. Our business headquarters in Leominster is wherever I happen to be working that day. This lean setup gives us a tremendous advantage. We can put resources into content and technology rather than into keeping the lights on in a building.

The lack of a physical office does not hinder community engagement if you leverage the internet correctly. We interact with our Leominster readers via social media, email newsletters, and community forums. Readers tip us off to stories on Facebook; local businesses reach out by email about advertising. The old practice of people stopping by the newsroom to drop off press releases or chat with an editor has been supplanted by instant digital communication. In short, the value proposition of a brick-and-mortar newsroom has largely evaporated. The Champion’s physical presence (or lack thereof) made no difference in the end. What mattered was its digital presence – and there it lagged. If anything, the Champion’s legacy infrastructure (printing presses, office costs) was a burden that newer models like mine do not carry.

News Link Live’s Agile, Data-Driven Model

So what makes News Link Live more agile and sustainable where a legacy paper like the Champion faltered? In a nutshell: we built a new model from the ground up for the digital era. We are a free, state-based digital newspaper that covers every city and town in Massachusetts, but we pay extremely close attention to what our readers engage with and we double-down on those areas. Leominster, for example, emerged as our single strongest audience hub, which is why we’ve made it one of our focal points. This data-driven flexibility – identifying high-interest communities and serving them more – is something legacy papers rarely did. They were stuck with the geographic coverage in their masthead (a Clinton paper covers Clinton, a Leominster paper covers Leominster) even if reader interest might actually lie elsewhere. In contrast, we let reader analytics guide our content strategy. If we see Leominster stories getting traction statewide, we’ll produce more of them. If a certain town’s stories consistently flop, we’ll allocate resources differently. This dynamic approach has been key to our success.

Let’s talk numbers. Since our launch in February 2022, News Link Live’s website has been viewed over 1.9 million times by more than 1.4 million unique visitors. Those would be envy-inducing figures for any local outlet, let alone a startup news site that began as a woman owned operation with zero venture capital support or grant funding. Our traffic has accelerated each year. In 2023, we averaged about 41,600 page views per month; in 2024 that grew to 53,800 per month; and now in 2025 we’re averaging 114,300 page views per month. That’s more than double last year’s level. On a daily basis, News Link Live now sees roughly 4,000–4,400 page views per day, up from 1,800/day in 2024. For a point of comparison, these figures put us far ahead of the traffic most small-town weekly newspapers get on their sites.

To illustrate, here’s a rough comparison of News Link Live’s digital reach versus some nearby local outlets:

Estimated Monthly Website Pageviews (2025)

News Outlet	Approx. Monthly Pageviews
News Link Live (statewide)	114,000+
The Gardner News (daily)	~7,500 (est.)
The Landmark (Holden weekly)	~5,000 (est.)
Clinton Item (Clinton weekly)	~5,000 (est.)
The Grafton News (weekly)	~3,000 (est.)

As shown above, News Link Live’s audience size dramatically exceeds that of legacy weekly papers in our orbit. Even if the exact numbers for each weekly are hard to obtain (and may fluctuate), the order-of-magnitude difference is clear. We’re reaching tens of thousands of readers online, while many print-first outlets struggle to get a few thousand views behind their paywalls. Notably, The Landmark in Holden and The Grafton News were two of the papers CherryRoad acquired alongside the Champion in 2022 – they were “saved” on paper, but their digital impact remains modest. By contrast, News Link Live – which didn’t even exist until 2022 – has become a go-to news source for Leominster and surrounding areas, entirely through our online presence and social media distribution.

Another strength of our model is engagement quality. It’s not just about raw page views, but how deeply readers interact. Our average session time is an impressive 6 minutes and 15 seconds per visit. That suggests people aren’t just clicking headlines and bouncing; they’re actually reading our stories thoroughly. (For context, a 6+ minute average session is far above industry benchmarks for news sites.) It tells me that when readers come to News Link Live, they find substantive content that holds their attention. This kind of engagement is hard to achieve with the short, infrequent “fluff” articles typical of weekly papers.

Furthermore, we meet our audience where they are: on their phones and on social media. A whopping 89% of News Link Live’s readers access the site on mobile devices. This aligns with broader trends – most people get news on their smartphones now – but many traditional outlets still haven’t fully optimized for mobile or capitalized on mobile distribution. We have. Nearly all our content is designed to be mobile-friendly and easily shareable. And speaking of shareable: almost 90% of our traffic comes from Facebook referrals. We embraced Facebook as the modern town square, posting our stories to local community groups and pages where residents naturally congregate. The result is a firehose of traffic from social media. (Our second-largest traffic source is the aggregator NewsBreak, at about 4.6%, and Google search is third at 3.6%). Clearly, Facebook is the king for us. Traditional papers like the Champion never mastered this kind of distribution – some barely updated their Facebook pages or weren’t proactive in engaging online communities. By leveraging social channels effectively, News Link Live gained massive reach at virtually no cost.

The demographics of our readership also tell a story about who is consuming local news now. According to our analytics, over two-thirds of our readers are men, and the largest age groups are 35+. In fact, the typical reader is a 55-year-old male, which interestingly is the same core demographic newspapers have long had (explaining why old papers added lifestyle sections to lure women readers, often with limited success). This means we’re actually capturing the traditional news audience – but doing it online – as well as younger folks who find us through social media. We didn’t lose the older readers; they followed us to the internet because we’re offering content relevant to them without a paywall barrier. So when people suggest that “older folks only read print,” our experience contradicts that: if you give them an easy, free digital option with the local content they care about, they will embrace it.

A new way to monetize local news

Of course, readership alone doesn’t pay the bills. So how does News Link Live sustain itself if it’s free to read? The answer is a modern revenue model rooted in sponsorships and programmatic ads—an approach with deep roots in media history.

Bob Hope, one of America’s most recognizable entertainers, pioneered this kind of model with The Pepsodent Show in 1938. Rather than relying on scattered commercials, Hope built his weekly radio program around a single title sponsor—Pepsodent toothpaste. The show’s success was inseparable from the sponsor’s support, and Pepsodent’s name became synonymous with both the program and its popularity. This direct integration of sponsor and platform helped fund the show’s production and cemented a new advertising model that benefited both creator and brand.

That legacy is alive in News Link Live’s business model. By partnering directly with Wellpoint—a Massachusetts-based health benefits provider—the publication offers consistent statewide exposure through banner ads, integrated content, and targeted Facebook campaigns, especially during key enrollment periods. This isn’t just a transactional ad buy. It’s a relationship where both parties benefit: Wellpoint gains access to a large, engaged audience, and News Link Live gains the stability needed to focus on producing quality local journalism.

In addition, the site runs programmatic ads through Google AdSense. These generate passive revenue based on impressions, scaling automatically with audience growth.

Together, these revenue streams form a sustainable, audience-driven system. As traffic increases, so does value for sponsors—creating a feedback loop of growth and reinvestment. Unlike legacy newspapers saddled with overhead and shrinking subscriber lists, News Link Live remains lean, adaptable, and focused on building a direct relationship with both readers and sponsors.

Personality-Driven Media in the AI Era

One of the less obvious reasons News Link Live thrives where the Champion didn’t is our embrace of a personality-driven media model – ironically combined with artificial intelligence tools. Let me explain what that means. In today’s media landscape, people increasingly follow individual voices and personalities, not impersonal institutions. A lot of news discovery happens via personalities on Twitter, YouTube, Substack, etc., where the human voice is front and center. Recognizing this, I have not hidden behind a faceless news brand. I regularly interact with readers in first person, whether on Facebook or through columns like this. News Link Live’s “Staff Writer” byline (which I often use for articles that I generate with AI assistance and then edit) has essentially become one of the most popular “writers” on the site – second only to my own name.

Meanwhile, we’ve tested pure AI-generated content, and the results were instructive. Early on, when AI text generation became available, I had an experiment: I published one story clearly labeled as written by AI (I even noted it on the article’s feature image). The piece was a routine local story that I could have written myself, but I wanted to gauge reader reaction if it was explicitly marked as AI-written. The outcome? That story was viewed only 10 times in total since it went up in April 2023! Essentially, it sank without a trace – readers showed zero interest, likely because it lacked any human touch or credibility. This underscores a crucial point: content overtly labeled as AI or lacking a human persona tends to underperform. People are naturally skeptical or simply less drawn to it.

On the other hand, by using AI as a behind-the-scenes tool to generate drafts or coverage of routine news, and then presenting it under a generic but human-sounding byline (“Staff Writer”), we achieved significant output gains without alienating readers. As mentioned, that hybrid approach has been very successful – those articles get plenty of views and no one complains that they feel robotic, because I ensure they meet a quality bar and carry a familiar voice. In sum, media is still a personality-based business, but what it means to be a “personality” has changed. It doesn’t always require a famous TV anchor or star reporter; it can be an engaging Facebook page persona or a trusted curator of news. I’ve effectively built a personal brand around News Link Live, and that brand carries into everything we publish, AI-assisted or not.

The Champion, by contrast, operated in the old paradigm of a faceless institution. It had some well-meaning local correspondents and bylines, but there was no charismatic digital presence pulling readers in. Its ownership never leaned into the publisher’s personality or reporters’ personalities to draw an audience. Additionally, while News Link Live deftly wove AI into its workflow to increase volume (with my oversight), a paper like the Champion likely lacked the resources or mindset to experiment with AI in any meaningful way. And when large chains do try to innovate, it can backfire. Take Gannett’s attempt to automate local sports coverage in 2023: the company rolled out AI-generated game summaries that included placeholder errors like “[[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeats [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]]…” — mistakes that quickly went viral. After widespread ridicule from readers and national media attention, Gannett was forced to pause the program, newsslahdot.org reported.

The lesson is clear: AI is not a magic solution for struggling newsrooms, especially if used without human judgment; and right now, AI largely increases efficiency by cutting down on the time of tasks, it doesn’t write better than a seasoned journalist and it has to be fact checked. The Champion’s corporate owners may have been tempted by such tech fixes, but ultimately what wins trust is the human element – being part of the community conversation, with real people fronting your content. That’s something we’ve done from the start, and it’s paid off in stronger audience loyalty.

Old Papers, Old Habits: The Innovation Gap

Finally, we need to talk about the cultural differences that set ventures like News Link Live apart from legacy newspapers. Traditional papers – especially those on life support under big chains – tend to be risk-averse and slow to innovate. The Leominster Champion fell into this trap. Under corporate ownership, it didn’t have the freedom (or perhaps the daring) to reinvent itself. Large media companies often impose strict guidelines, resist experimentation, and focus on cost-cutting over innovation. The Champion’s playbook remained the standard weekly newspaper formula: a predictable mix of local event coverage, some columns, some press releases, all packaged in a print-centric way, all regurgitated fluff. That formula simply isn’t exciting or unique enough in today’s attention economy.

Meanwhile, as an independent publisher, I could try new things constantly. If an offbeat story or a sensational regional piece started trending on Facebook, I’d jump on it and publish, even if it wasn’t a typical “town news” item – because traffic is traffic, and it often brought new readers who then also saw our local coverage. I doubt the Champion had the latitude to pursue stories outside a certain traditional scope. Corporate local papers also tend to shy away from controversy or anything that might rock the boat, which can make them boring. Being risk-averse might seem safe, but in media it’s actually risky: you risk irrelevance if you never try new approaches or speak hard truths. My sense is that the Champion, particularly in its final years, played it very safe editorially (likely fearing to offend remaining advertisers or overseers) and thus gave people little reason to tune in.

Moreover, legacy newspapers no longer have the resources to invest in real journalistic talent the way they used to. Most of the Champion’s experienced reporters either took buyouts or were laid off over the years. By the end, I suspect the content was largely produced by a very small team or freelancers on shoestring pay. This is not a recipe for compelling journalism that can compete for readers’ attention. Investigative reporting, in-depth features, deep community coverage – those require time and money, which struggling papers don’t have. News Link Live, operating on a different model, isn’t flush with money either, but I’ve managed to produce a high volume of timely local news by supplementing my own work with AI draft generation and focusing on efficiency. It’s a different kind of investment in “talent” – more about tech-assisted productivity than hiring a big newsroom staff – but it yields volume and breadth of coverage that a tiny traditional newsroom can’t match.

The proof is in the outcomes: we publish far more Massachusetts local stories per week than a weekly like the Champion ever could. Quantity isn’t everything, but in the online era, you need a constant drumbeat of fresh content to stay relevant (and please the algorithms). The Champion, limited by legacy constraints, just couldn’t keep up – perhaps one issue a week, a handful of stories, and that was it. There was no way that competes with a nimble digital outlet pumping out multiple updates daily and rapidly sharing them on social channels.

In short, the Champion failed not for lack of effort or because the community didn’t need news – it failed because it was built on an old chassis that couldn’t be retooled in time. It was owned by a company that, though earnest in mission, didn’t empower it with the radical changes needed. It tried to operate with a dwindling base of subscribers and advertisers, an old-fashioned editorial approach, and without the benefit of a strong personality or digital strategy. That might have been enough 20 years ago, but not today.

The Future of Local News: Lessons Learned

As the publisher of News Link Live, I take no joy in seeing another local newspaper shut down. The closure of The Leominster Champion is a loss for the community in many ways – especially for those who loved seeing their neighborhood news in print each week. But I believe there’s also a silver lining: it clears the field for new models of local journalism to take root and hopefully thrive. We’ve shown at News Link Live that a different approach can work, at least on the level of building audience and engagement. We’ve proven that you can cover local happenings without a subscription barrier, reach tens of thousands of people through savvy use of digital tools, and support it with innovative revenue streams. We’ve demonstrated that being agile, personality-driven, and tech-enabled can outperform the legacy approach of being staid, corporate, and print-bound.

The story of why the Champion failed is also, in a sense, the story of why we succeeded. Where they were losing money and readers, we gained them. Where they were tied to old methods, we experimented with new ones. The takeaway for anyone who cares about local news is that survival requires evolution. Community news will not survive simply out of nostalgia or habit – it has to adapt to how people live now. That means being digitally native, embracing social media, harnessing AI but keeping the human touch, staying lean, and finding revenue beyond subscriptions. It means being bold enough to abandon sacred cows (like the idea that everyone must pay for news, or that a newspaper must have a newsroom office, or that AI has no place in journalism).

Leominster isn’t losing local news coverage – it’s just shifting from one era to the next. As of this writing, News Link Live has had over 1.9 million pageviews and 1.4 million unique visitors statewide and beyond, and Leominster remains our single biggest source of traffic. I consider it an honor and a responsibility that so many in the Leominster area have turned to us after the Champion’s decline. We’ll continue to serve those readers with the timely, free, and relevant news they seek. My hope is that our success can be a blueprint for other communities: a hybrid model of journalism that blends new technology with old-school community engagement, run by passionate locals who are not afraid to break the mold.

In the end, The Leominster Champion failed for very clear reasons – but those reasons also light the path forward. The future of local journalism in Leominster and beyond will belong to those who innovate, localize, and prioritize readers over tradition. The presses may have stopped at the Champion, but the news carries on – just in a different form, and I’m excited to be part of that evolution.