Every morning, 140 newspapers from 29 states are delivered to the front door of David Hoffmann’s $105 million, 24,202-square-foot estate in the Port Royal neighborhood of Naples, Florida. The papers, all but nine of which he owns and which range in circulation from 5,000 to 250,000, eventually make their way to Hoffmann’s office. There the 73-year-old billionaire settles into his leather blue desk chair, facing the bay, and starts reading. He divides the papers into two stacks: the toss pile and the “red pen” pile—papers he marks up with a felt-tip. He’ll discuss the red pen pile later with Nathan Bekke, the interim CEO of Lee Enterprises, one of the nation’s biggest newspaper chains, in which Hoffmann took a controlling interest in February. Sometimes it’s an inflammatory headline that catches his eye. Other times it’s politics: Associated Press stories, for instance, are sometimes a little to the left for him. He also dislikes articles that don’t portray a city in the most accurate light.

“I am going to save newspapers in America,” declares Hoffmann, who owns 42 titles outright plus a 53% stake in Lee, which publishes 70-plus newspapers including the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, Buffalo News and Omaha World- Herald. “I am hopefully going to do something for America that is meaningful and far-reaching.”

That’s a bold claim given the industry’s struggles. Nearly 40% of U.S. newspapers have vanished in the past two decades, leaving 50 million Americans in “news deserts” with limited or no access to a reliable source of local info, according to the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. The problem is getting worse: More than 130 papers shut down in 2025. The internet won’t help: Monthly unique page views of the 100 largest U.S. papers are down more than 45% on average over the past four years, per Medill.

But Hoffmann believes he has found a strategy to make local papers not only survive but thrive: a seemingly simple blend of preserving cash and making a profit while doubling down on what he calls “hyperlocal” content. The nation’s lar­gest newspaper chain, Gannett, and Palm Beach–based hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which owns more than 170 titles, are both notorious for cutting staff. But Hoffmann has branded layoffs a “bad word.” He’s even adding a few newsroom jobs to bolster coverage of local tourism, sports and business, reflecting his unabashed belief that such boosterism is important for communities’ health.

As he rolls up more papers, he’s consolidating payroll, sharing services like legal and marketing among titles and sometimes reducing the frequency of the printed product; online he’s pivoting toward paywalls. All local publishers have full P&L responsibility and share in the profits if they hit their numbers.

It seems to be working. Every one of the 48 titles he’s bought since 2022 and owns outright through Hoffmann Media Group is making money. As for Lee Enterprises, he’s providing a massive liquidity injection that restructured the company’s troubling debt. As of January, Lee Enterprises was sitting on $455 million in debt—a legacy of its 2020 purchase of Berkshire Hatha­way’s 31 newspapers—carrying a 9% interest rate. Hoffmann’s $50 million equity placement (of which he personally contributed $35 million) allowed the company to negotiate that rate down to 5% for five years, instantly wiping $18 million in annual interest payments off the books. Other immediate steps he took after assuming control in early February: installing Bekke (formerly COO) as interim CEO (Lee’s former CEO retired as part of the deal), eliminating a third of the board and consolidating some printing plant operations. “The team wasn’t winning, and we needed a new coach,” Hoffmann says. The stock has doubled since the deal was announced.

With debt stabilized, Hoffmann is doubling down on that ultra-local coverage. That starts with high school sports, which bring places together. He quickly inked a partnership with Nebraska sports tech firm Hudl, whose tech enables papers to show nearly instant game highlights online as a way to build subscriber loyalty and attract advertisers. Lee Enterprises will roll out Hudl, which is already being used in St. Louis, across other markets in the next six to eight months.

Hoffmann is in the middle of a roadshow to meet business leaders in Lee’s key markets, which started in St. Louis in March and is continuing on to Omaha, Nebraska; Buffalo, New York; Richmond and Roanoke, Virginia; Madison, Wisconsin; and Phoenix. While on the road, he is pitching businesses to subscribe and advertise. (Hoffmann wants to be the top salesperson and has already brought in over a half-million dollars in annual ad revenue and 500 new subscribers.)

Once upon a time, small-town monopoly newspapers were precious. Nostalgic investors might thus gravitate to the scarcely profitable Lee Enterprises or USA Today. Those with a cooler head will prefer News Corporation, whose press lord, Rupert Murdoch, has skillfully pivoted to the digital age. In the interpretation by the folks running AVI Global Trust, a London closed-end, News Corp. is not so much a media company as a family holding company trading at a discount to the value of its assets. Among those: the Wall Street Journal, HarperCollins, Dow Jones Energy, the Factiva news tracking service and 61% of the Australian real estate middleman REA Group.

William Baldwin is Forbes’ Investment Strategies columnist. Illustration by Patrick Welsh for Forbes

His dedication to small-town news traces back to his childhood in Washington, Missouri, about an hour outside St. Louis, where his father, a World War II vet with a seventh-grade education, drove a milk truck, and his mother, an orphan, waited tables and later cared for newborns at the local hospital. The family had no running hot water until he was in high school, something he sees as “an advantage, not a disadvantage.” (Hoffmann ranks 45th on our list of the Greatest Self-Made Americans; see page 70.) Sports were his lifeline; he got a scholarship to play football and baseball at Northeast Missouri State University. He quit school when injuries kept him out but later put himself through the University of Central Missouri doing factory work and baling hay. After graduating with a degree in industrial safety and occupational health, he worked for several companies including Pullman Standard, which manufactured New York’s subway cars.

At 36, he put two mortgages on his house to start an executive search firm, DHR Global. These days, through his Hoffmann Family of Companies, he has investments in more than 125 businesses, from Missouri wineries to Mississippi River cruises to a minor league hockey team in Estero, Florida. He’s also buying the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, pen­ding league approval. “He’s not afraid to take a risk, because he knows what it’s like to come from nothing,” says his son Greg, who runs the family’s real estate business. “He has built his core fundamentals not around success but what he believes in.”

It was a trip to visit his hockey-playing grandsons, Henry and George, and soccer-playing granddaughter, Adelaide, on Chicago’s North Shore in 2021 that got him into the newspaper business. Still a big sports fan, he wanted to read about the kids’ games and see their photos in the paper, but the local Glenview, Illinois, Pioneer Press had recently shut down. He looked into buying it but was too late. Laid-off staff had scattered; equipment had been sold. “I thought ‘This is wrong,’ ” he recalls. “That was the moment I knew I was going to embark on a program to save newspapers in small towns in America.”

A year later, around the time his two sons became co-CEOs of his holding company, Hoffmann made his first foray into media, buying Fort Myers–based Florida Weekly, founded by Pason Gaddis, a Gannett veteran who is now CEO of Hoffmann’s privately held media group. From there the pair picked up a handful of titles in tourist spots including Michigan’s Mackinac Island Town Crier (2023), California’s Napa Valley Register (2024) and Colorado’s Telluride Times (September 2025) and Aspen Daily News (December 2025). Another key part of the plan is to focus increasingly on origi­nal local content and rely less on third parties like the Associated Press, which provides most small papers with their national and international news. Hoffmann and Gaddis are also interested in using their papers to host events, like RV and house-and-garden shows. “Similar to how musicians had to move from record sales to concerts, we see an opportunity to leverage our brand trust to be an event leader in our communities,” Gaddis says.

As for AI’s impact, Hoffmann is not concerned, explaining that he thinks there is a place for it but that it won’t replace good, trusted journalism. Adds Gaddis, “Exploring AI monetization, not fearing it, we understand the digital transformation and are doubling down.”

With letters of intent signed to buy another nine publications, and more in the pipeline, Hoffmann is keen to irrigate as many news deserts as he can—and with a net worth of $2.6 billion, he has plenty of money to do so. He knows he has skeptics. But with his focus on profitability, he remains bullish. “It’s not brain surgery. . . . We don’t mind being judged on our performance,” says Hoffmann, whose own small-town success story reminds him why these American locales are still worth the investment.

© Forbes