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“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.
When we spoke recently, Newton attributed his early success in part to summaries of the print paper he’d been posting on TikTok. “Especially people that are my age that aren’t picking up print newspapers anymore,” he said, “maybe they see what’s happening on social media and will be like, ‘I should pick up a newspaper.’ I’ve seen evidence of that already.” A teen recently approached Newton at a high school football game and told him, “I didn’t even know that Monticello had a paper, and now I’m trying to get one every week.”
Newton was video-calling me from the Monticello News headquarters, a small red house off the town square that the previous publisher still owns; there’s a residential tenant upstairs. Newton—who, as the paper’s only full-time employee, serves as the main reporter, opinion columnist, and designer—works out of an open space in close proximity to his few colleagues: one part-time employee who handles ads and another who juggles legal notices and occasional writing duties. “Maybe in the future I can find some doors to put up,” he told me. “We’ll see.”
At Georgia College & State University a few years ago, Newton was more interested in film than journalism, but he discovered his love for covering local stories during his internship at the Monticello News. Newton liked the experience so much that Kathy Mudd, the paper’s former owner, tried to sell him the publication two years ago. “He’s young, he’s energetic, and he has a passion for it,” Mudd, whose family bought the paper in 1975, told me. Newton, however, felt that he didn’t have enough experience. He changed his mind after becoming the managing editor of the Covington News, which serves a larger community in an adjacent county. “I began to see what was happening in journalism,” he said. “You have small papers being bought out by conglomerates. That was around the time that Kathy reached out to me again. She said, ‘I’m seventy, and I’m ready to retire. Here’s my offer.’ And she gave me a great offer.”
Newton wouldn’t say what the offer was, only that he put up his own savings toward the cost. He continues to pay Mudd to lease the paper’s office and to fulfill the terms of their owner financing agreement. I asked Newton whether the paper was profitable. “It can be. At times it is, at times it isn’t,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have bought it if I didn’t think that we could get it to be profitable. I think we’re on the right track to get there. I really, really do.” He hopes to keep selling more subscriptions, which, along with the proceeds from legal notices, is one of the paper’s major revenue drivers.
Thanks to an almost overnight bump in ad sales, Newton already has more pages to fill with local news, of which there’s plenty: crime stories, the announcement of a new Domino’s, data center development. “You’re not going to be able to find out what’s going on in Jasper County on any of the TV stations or in the Atlanta paper. But you’re going to find out about it here. It’s resulted in some success here in the short term, and I hope in the long term,” he said. Mudd told me that she’s happy Newton opted to gain experience before taking her up on her offer. “He’s still got a learning curve, and I’m going to go in today and make a couple of suggestions,” she said. “But he’s doing a terrific job. People really like the paper.”
Newton hopes to hire another full-time employee; his goal is eventually to own several local papers. “I would just tell people, if they had any interest, either in local journalism or if they wanted to go out and buy their local paper, just do it,” he said. “I mean, it’s a lot of hard work, but just go out and do it. Be a part of what’s going on.” He had another message: “I was asked the other day if local journalism was boring, and I was like, ‘It may be boring, but it’s necessary.’”
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