Q&A with Active Media publisher Matt Nelson
Nelson recently acquired the Sherwood Sun news and launched a monthly print edition
Sherwood, Ore. — On Monday, Jan. 5, the Sherwood Sun was acquired by Aurora-based Active Media Publishing Group, owned by Matt Nelson.
The Sherwood Sun was launched in September 2025 by Founding Editor Jules Rogers as an independent, family-run digital publication with a weekly newsletter. With Active Media’s support, the Sherwood Sun will soon be a monthly print publication mailed directly to every mailbox in Sherwood. Look for yours in your mailbox on March 3!
Rogers and Nelson sit down together to discuss the future of the publication as they team up to expand and improve Oregon’s media landscape.
Rogers: What inspired you to expand your magazine business into newspapers?
Nelson: I was looking online to see what other magazine companies might be available for purchase, and I saw a newspaper for sale, and I thought to myself, hmm, there’s a different opportunity. We had started adding articles and doing stories and interviews and photography and things in our publications, in addition to just doing coupons like we had done for years. So I thought, hey, we're kind of, tiptoeing down that road anyway. Let's see what it's all about. When I bought the Mountain Times (in May 2023), I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. There are a lot of similarities, but there are also a lot of differences running a paper, and we actually had an absolute blast. It was so much fun. Everybody in their office really, really loves working on the newspaper. That was my first job when I was a kid — I was a newspaper delivery boy, so it kind of brings everything full circle. I still have my bike that I delivered papers on.
Rogers: Where does your passion for journalism come from?
Nelson: When I went to college at Linfield, I went in as a dual major, business administration and mass communications. My idea was I want to do an advertising major, but they didn't have it, so I merged those two. One of my classes I had to take was a journalism class. They assigned me, you’re going to have to cover this symposium for the evening and summarize what you see. I went in, I sat down, and I listened to the symposium, which was extremely boring. I don't even remember what it was, and I'm thinking to myself, I don't want to be a journalist. And I literally, after the event was over, I walked out and I dropped the class the next day. So there you go. The fact that I find myself in this position, there's a tinge of irony that I'm here — granted, I am not a writer, I am a publisher.
Rogers: How does the Sherwood Sun fit into Active Media’s broader portfolio and long-term strategy?
Nelson: Our portfolio is made up of a whole bunch of local community publications. The Sherwood paper is our fourth local community newspaper, so it fits really nicely. It feels good to be launching it. I'm excited. We're still in the very early stages of getting things going from an advertising standpoint, and getting all the parts and pieces built together, but things seem to be going in the right direction. The level of enthusiasm that we're receiving from the community when they hear, hey, we're going to get a paper back, that's cool. It'll be really neat to see what the community thinks as a whole when they get one in their mailbox, and then we start getting responses and feedback from that. As far as long-term is concerned, I've been publishing in the Sherwood area since 2004 consecutively, and now coming up April, will be 22 consecutive years. So I think this will just fit nicely, and hopefully go for another 22 and beyond.
Rogers: What does success look like for the Sherwood Sun in one year?
Nelson: My goal for the Sherwood Sun would be to have what I would call a heavily fortified paper, and what that means is the publication comes out to 28-32 pages — which is an aggressive goal — full of advertisers, full of a lot of stories, a lot of local community content, a lot of contributors, and an engaged community reading the paper, commenting, collaborating, and engaged within what it is we're trying to do out there. That's success for me in one year. Happy writers, happy reporters, happy designers, happy sales reps, happy customers, happy happy readers.
Rogers: Why do you believe print journalism is still viable and necessary in 2026?
Nelson: A couple of reasons. I am of that tiny little group of individuals that is maybe not as tiny as it seems. I have never given up on print, never once. Do I look at my phone, yes. Do I read a computer also? Yes. But because of the industry I've been in, I've always believed print is alive and well. I think that a lot of things have happened over the last 20 years, some of them amazing inventions and technology and advancements, and some of them are proving to be really, really good distractions. I think society as a whole is getting burnt out on screens and screen time — fatigue is a real thing. There is something to be said about the speed at which one can consume print media compared to digital media. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with digital media, because it certainly is here today and will be here forever, but there's a nostalgic aspect to what we do.
People love to say, there’s nothing I love more than just to sit back and relax, drinking a cup of coffee, reading the paper. If it's printed and mailed out, chances are whatever you're reading has been vetted pretty well and is going to be accurate information. You're not going to get that spam material that's cheap and easy to throw out and entities will send out all these clutter-type articles. There's a certain level of trust that readers have in printed material because they know somebody's paying for this to happen — and there's local community information. People love to read about their communities, their local information, their local activities and events that are happening. So there's a level of trust that goes in with that as well.
People always say, Oh, isn't print dead? I'm like, Well, if it's dead, then I must be running a zombie company. In 2025, Active Media published 508 different titles, and we’re slated for 536 this year assuming we don’t open up any other territories. We started putting a little heart on the bottom of a lot of our products. We mail it out, and that just says Americans love print. And I did that on purpose. I did that with the conscious effort to combat the easy saying, oh, print is dead. No, it's not dead. It is alive and well. And Americans love print. We've taken a much smaller approach, focusing on smaller communities and working with them to package up local content, local information and things that people enjoy consuming locally.
Rogers: How does Active Media support small, hyperlocal newsrooms in the context of today’s challenging media landscape?
Nelson: By creating these little publications we have all over the place, whether it be a newspaper or magazine, it opens up opportunities for us to bring on local writers to do stories, and it just seems to work. We've met a lot of great writers over the last couple of years, and I think we just do it because we enjoy doing it. The fact that we're able to help employ people and bring them revenue in a world where it's a lot harder to go out and get revenue doing this, it feels good to be able to do that, and we just enjoy it. And that's what our plan is — to continue to expand, grow, add more things, write more stories, sell more ads, and print more magazines and papers — and away we go.
Rogers: What keeps you motivated to continue investing in local journalism after 25 years?
Nelson: I enjoy what I do. I just do. I wake up in the morning excited to get to work, and I just love working, and I love my job. I love this. I have met other publishers, and you can measure their level of excitement based on how they act and how they talk about their products. And I have met businesspeople where the owners are ready to sell, and I look at them from a business-owner standpoint, compared to myself as a business owner — and I'm not there yet. I really, really enjoy what I do, and I'm going to keep going as long as it's fun.
Rogers: How can the community get involved in the Sherwood Sun?
Nelson: If they've got a story idea, we want to hear about it. If they love something about a paper, we want to hear about it. They hate something about the paper, we want to hear about it. We can't get that local flavor infused if we're not getting feedback from our readers, and we need to have them engaged. We want to have the paper used for celebrating milestones, whether it be the celebration of life or let's say someone's getting engaged, or they get married, or they've got a wedding anniversary that they're celebrating, or there's a birth in the family, or somebody gets their Eagle Scout award, or somebody wins an Olympic medal, or whatever — we want to be able to write about those kinds of things, because that's really what gives the flavor of that local community. In order to do that, we need to have people emailing. If they don’t, we might not know.
Jules Rogers
