Chariton Media

Chariton Media LLC was formed in 2007 as Truman Lake News — a small, sub-1,000 monthly circulation newspaper breathing its last breath when our founding partners acquired it. Within six months, they turned it into the fastest-growing paper in Missouri: from under 1,000 monthly readers to 6,000 audited weekly subscribers.

One of the keys to the turnaround was a custom Drupal script that allowed direct export from the CMS into Adobe InDesign. That piece of software let Truman Lake News run lean and mean — a small team producing a competitive weekly paper without the overhead that was killing publications everywhere else. It was also the primary reason behind Truman Lake News' acquisition by a national media chain.

After the acquisition, Truman Lake News became Masthead Media — a boutique publisher of internal and external communications for businesses and nonprofits. We wrote custom software for media companies navigating the convergence age: newspapers producing broadcast-quality TV news footage and podcasts while simultaneously prepping stories for community websites and sub-daily publications.

We didn't publish much in those years. Instead, we made the people who publish your content successful — with custom solutions built around how modern media actually works, not how legacy vendors thought it should.

Today, Chariton Media is what happens when nearly two decades of publishing experience meets modern technology. Our book imprint publishes up to 30 titles per year — and we're looking to grow. Our community journalism enterprise started with wanting to help a single town get its news back, and is on track to expand to more than 25 AI-powered newspapers by the end of 2026.

And our bespoke software practice ties the past and present to a practical path into the future. We don't make the giant leaps forward in technology. We make the giant leaps forward work for you.