How Keith Pepper turned an Atlanta newspaper chain into a digital-first media company

He started by consolidating the publications into a single web brand.

When Keith Pepper bought a chain of print newspapers back in 2020, he received an email from a columnist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution that basically asked if he was crazy. But Keith had a plan for taking a company that generated 98% of its revenue from print advertising and converting it into a digital-first media company.

And he’s done just that. Today, Rough Draft Atlanta generates 27% of its revenue from digital ads, and it managed this feat without seeing a significant decline in print advertising. This has allowed Keith to reinvest in the business by hiring more journalists, and it’s now stronger than ever.

In a recent interview, Keith explained how he consolidated all the newspapers under a single brand, his strategy for attracting online ads, and why he’s avoided placing his content behind a paywall:

So I bought the company in December of 2020. In March of 2021, we launched a morning newsletter called Rough Draft Atlanta. And it was a new endeavor. It was a new brand. We started from zero. It was a new model for Atlanta. So Axios wasn't here yet. They hadn't launched Axios local. I had been following what Ted had done with the Charlotte agenda. So that was the vision – something between the Morning Brew, the Skim, the Hustle, and what they were doing in Charlotte. I took all of those inputs and, and knew that we needed something like Rough Draft in Atlanta.

There just wasn't something like that. And it was for an audience of one, because I had moved back here after being away for a long time. And I wanted to know what was happening around town where – what did I need to know about food concerts, et cetera. So that was what we had in mind when we built Rough Draft. So that was the name that has led to the entire digital presence and the company being rebranded as Rough Draft Atlanta.

Watch the interview in the video embedded below: