Scott Tobias built a digital future on local trust

Scott Tobias’s career begins with an advertising sales job at Westword in 1993, a sensible place to learn that a city has both a personality and bills to pay. The newspaper covered Denver’s cultural life; its advertisers wanted a place in it. Tobias went on to become a publisher, an operations executive and the leader of a management buyout. Along the way, the means of attracting a customer changed considerably. The need to understand that customer remained stubbornly employed.

Today he is president and CEO of Voice Media Group and the founding CEO of V Digital Services, the agency developed within it. His professional geography stretches across newspaper markets and digital advertising partnerships. His public life also includes the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, where he serves as a founding board member and co-chair. Search results, newspaper pages and concert stages make an unusual set of working surfaces. In Tobias’s case, they belong to the same long acquaintance with local business and local culture.

A sales desk before the corner office

Tobias studied business administration and marketing at the University of Northern Colorado’s Monfort College of Business. His first documented sales and marketing role was at Westword. There followed a succession of jobs within the publishing organization, including publisher of its Kansas City publication, group publisher and chief operating officer. He learned the business from several seats before acquiring a responsibility for deciding where the whole thing should go.

There is a useful distinction between selling an advertisement and running the institution that carries it. The former demands a reason for a customer to spend. The latter adds payroll, operations, distribution and the question of whether that reason will still persuade anyone next year. Tobias’s progression brought those responsibilities together. He arrived at the digital transformation of publishing with experience of its daily commercial machinery, rather than merely an opinion about its future.

Westword remained part of his working life. His publisher biography identifies him as its publisher as well as VMG’s CEO. That continuing connection gives the career a particular shape: considerable change within an extended family of businesses. The company names and ownership arrangements evolved; the Denver publication where he started kept appearing in the picture.

Thirteen papers, a new set of obligations

On September 24, 2012, a management buyout was announced that would put the publishing and related sales properties of Village Voice Media Holdings into the newly formed Voice Media Group. Tobias, previously chief operating officer, would become CEO. Christine Brennan would be executive editor, and Jeff Mars would serve as chief financial officer. It was a management team built from people already familiar with the operation’s editorial, financial and commercial demands.

The transaction covered thirteen alternative weeklies and their associated businesses. The classified website Backpage was excluded and remained with the previous owners. Tobias said he had arranged private financing for the acquisition. Those details matter to the shape of the story: this was the creation of a new ownership structure for an established publishing business, with experienced managers taking responsibility for its next decisions.

Asked about the company’s direction that November, Tobias described a business centered on a city’s articles, reviews, events and listings. He discussed reaching readers and advertisers through print, mobile, email and web products. Events built around food, art and music were also part of the plan. Even then, the commercial argument extended beyond a newspaper page. A local audience could gather in several places, and the company intended to meet it there.

The next customer was already a customer

V Digital Services launched in 2013. Its opening opportunity was local search marketing for businesses already advertising with the publication group. The logic was wonderfully free of glamour: people who knew the company needed help being found online. A relationship developed through one kind of advertising could become the introduction to another service.

“Our customers trusted us, and they wanted more from us in the space.”

Scott Tobias, 2018 agency interview

In that 2018 account, Tobias put the agency’s local SEO book at roughly 2,000 accounts after five years. Customers’ requests helped push the business toward a wider range of digital services, with specialist staff recruited to deliver them. The starting relationship could open the door. Fulfilling the new work required people with the relevant expertise.

That is the practical interest of the transition. A publishing company’s advertiser relationships offered a beginning, while the agency needed a service operation of its own. The ability to sell a familiar customer something new carries an obligation to make the new thing useful. Tobias’s stated approach emphasized results, hiring and listening to staff. His description of growth gave considerable space to the people expected to perform the work after a sale was made.

Growth required some goodbyes

The shift also involved selling newspapers. VMG completed the sale of LA Weekly to Semanal Media in November 2017. The transaction announcement described it as the seventh newspaper sold during a corporate realignment that reduced the print portfolio while building the digital business. Reinvention, in this instance, included giving up properties as well as adding capabilities. It came with transactions, names on agreements and a changing map.

VDS was widening its own map through partnerships. It entered Las Vegas in 2015 and announced a joint venture with Nevada entrepreneur Wayne Morgan in February 2017. Morgan’s businesses included publications, restaurants and automotive interests. The proposed combination paired local business relationships with the agency’s sales and digital capabilities. The logic echoed VDS’s beginnings: established connections could help new services find their customers.

Technology partnerships supplied another route. In a City and Regional Magazine Association member spotlight, Tobias credited the relationship with AdCellerant with adding more than a million dollars in programmatic revenue and another million in agency services. It is a concrete example of an executive using a partner’s capabilities to extend what his company could offer. Building a new business did not require every component to be invented inside it.

The early expansion produced dated milestones. VDS reported 40 percent revenue growth for 2017. It placed 79th on Entrepreneur’s 360 list that year, and Inc. records show appearances on the Inc. 5000 in 2017, 2018 and 2019. In 2018, it received a Bronze Stevie in the American Business Awards category for fastest-growing companies with up to 100 employees. Each recognition describes a particular stage, rather than an everlasting condition.

Tobias received an individual honor in October 2018, when the Business Intelligence Group named him small business executive of the year. He directed the credit toward the VMG and VDS teams. His remit included sales, operations, web development and finance, a list that brings the lofty business of strategy down to an unusually well-populated desk. An agency may present a single proposition to a customer; keeping that proposition requires several departments to agree on what happens next.

The present leadership list makes some of those responsibilities visible. Gerard Goroski leads digital operations as CIO and executive vice president; Stuart Folb leads digital sales; Jeff Mars remains listed as CFO. Tobias’s career is often described through his individual ascent, but the operation around him contains distinct kinds of expertise. The continuity of names is part of the story, too.

Another kind of local audience

At the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, Tobias shares the co-chair role with Paul Epstein, founder and former owner of Twist and Shout Records. The pairing brings a publisher and a record-store founder into the same civic institution. Both businesses have spent years attending to what people in a place care to hear. A board meeting is presumably less melodious than a concert, but it has its uses.

That June 2022 gathering celebrated refreshed museum exhibits at Red Rocks Trading Post. The evening included food, wine and performances by musicians connected to the Hall. Tobias and Epstein were photographed together among the guests. It is a pleasingly ordinary image of institutional work: two people at a gathering, taking part in the community whose history their organization preserves.

The commitment continued onstage in August 2025, when Jazz Aspen Snowmass and its founder, Jim Horowitz, were inducted into the Hall. Tobias joined Horowitz with vice chair RD Sewald, executive director Karen Radman and board member Rob Blume. His relationship with JAS had already spanned decades through Westword and VDS. A long commercial connection had acquired another occasion to meet.

In June 2026, the Hall announced Widespread Panic as the inaugural recipient of its Honorary Coloradan induction, alongside the posthumous induction of promoter Bill Bass. Tobias’s remarks recognized how musicians who live elsewhere can become part of Colorado’s cultural life through their performances and relationships here. It was a publisher’s familiar territory: the identity of a place, understood through the people who keep contributing to it.

Away from those commitments, his publicly described interests include hiking, skiing, tennis, movies and time with family. They put some welcome daylight around a career otherwise measured in properties, services and markets. Tobias began by helping advertisers reach a city’s readers. His work now travels through different channels, but the recurring cast remains recognizable: business owners, colleagues, audiences and the people who give a place something to talk about.