Within minutes of meeting John Garrett (pictured at top), three things become clear: 1) he's a man on a mission; 2) he's heavily influenced by his parents, and 3), he's strongly guided by his moral compass. Garrett is the co-founder (along with his wife, Jennifer) and CEO of Community Impact -- now the largest news organization in Texas and among the most widely distributed print publishers in the country with 36 editions and a 2.5 million circulation. Despite the newspaper industry's many challenges, the Garretts somehow cracked the code on a highly successful, and still growing, newspaper business model. Krista Van Lewen recently spoke with Garrett to learn more about how he and his team have beaten the odds. This is the first of a two-part series on Garrett and his business.
Krista Van Lewen: You have a long history in the news business. How did your career start?
John Garrett: I started at the Houston Chronicle back in 1997 -- the glory years. I was on the advertising side, working with large grocers on the "food team." We were doing a lot of mail targeting, which was a perfect set-up for what I do now, because things like targeting were just starting. But my parents instilled in me a love for local businesses. My family owned a local insurance brokerage company, specializing in mom and pops. My dad and mom would care for those business owners when bad things happened to them.
Van Lewen: Community Impact has been around for 17 years now. Tell me about its genesis.
Garrett: My wife and I decided to move back to Austin. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had a lot of really bad ideas. My wife said "no" to a lot of them, thankfully. But as a newspaper guy, I was looking at the community papers, which were lacking in business news. So, I created an idea originally called the Community Business News. My dad told me no one would ever read something with that title. The idea was to have the same high-quality business journalism as the Austin Business Journal for the average resident.
Van Lewen: Were you confident the Community Impact Newspaper, as it was first called, would be a success?
Garrett: Not at all. We took huge risks, financially, because we were mailing this to 60,000 people for free. I had taken out a line of credit on my Southwest Airlines card, and we went to work from our game room.
I had a lot of good contacts on the advertising side, but I was more concerned about the editorial, and how the product looked. We did a lot of charts and infographics similar to USA Today and found great reporters to cover local businesses. It was very important to have a high-quality product. We print on 35 lb., high-bright [paper], and it's stitched and trimmed so it looks very nice. It was a monthly, and people leave it on their coffee table.
That first one went out, and we knew we had a home run. We sold out the second edition [in October 2005] within two weeks. We got a small office and just kept growing.
Van Lewen: You expanded quickly from there, even in the face of the 2008 recession, Hurricane Harvey, and the pandemic. What's your secret?
Garrett: We started looking beyond our neighborhood. I hired Jason Culpepper, my coworker at the Houston Chronicle, and we went after Houston with the same high-quality product. And Houstonians liked it, so we just kept growing. We added Dallas, San Antonio, and even Phoenix and Nashville. The paper was so popular that we fared well even during the recession, through the hurricane, and the pandemic -- though we pulled back from our out-of-state editions in 2020. We let any advertiser who asked out of their advertising contract. They came back and are still with us today.
Our goal continues to be helping small businesses. We tell you who they are, what their story is, and reach tens of thousands of people in their area. We're almost 100% percent driven through ad revenue.
Over the course of 17 years, we've helped thousands of local businesses. They get to advertise, and we get to write about some great people. If you demonstrate through your content that you care about your community, readers will come, and advertisers will come.
Van Lewen: What was your next move when you grew to 36 different editions?
Garrett: We decided to go "phygital." We live in a physical world and a digital world - and we believe the future is both physical [print] and digital. We added a very successful daily email newsletter and continue to invest in improving our print product, too.
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