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TAB, along with CNC papers, sold to Liberty Group Publishing of Illinois
Community Newspaper Company, which owns 80+ weeklies in the Metro Boston area including the Watertown TAB, has been sold by Herald Media (of the Boston Herald) to Liberty Group Publishing of Illinois. Globe sez:
Patrick J. Purcell intends to sell his suburban newspaper holdings to an Illinois publisher for an estimated $225 million, according to publishing industry executives, a move that will create new challenges for his struggling tabloid, the Boston Herald.This has been anticipated for over a year, and it's big news. Liberty also bought the Enterprise Newspaper Group, which owns the Quincy Patriot Ledger and the Brockton Enterprise. Enterprise has a wonderful online experiment called Wicked Local. [That's one thing I don't understand about this deal. How was Enterprise tied in?]
The sale of Purcell's Community Newspaper Co. subsidiary to Liberty Group Publishing Inc. would be part of a $400 million deal that includes Liberty's acquisition of Enterprise NewsMedia LLC. Enterprise is the publisher of the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the Enterprise of Brockton, and a number of South Shore weeklies.
Previously:
TAB Publisher Herald Media May be Up for Sale
Local Media Timeline: the TAB and the Herald
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Enterprise wasn't tied in. The Enterprise NewsMedia and CNC deals were completely separate, though simultaneous. Liberty bought both at the same time because CNC's coverage of the South Shore and South Coast is incomplete, but Enterprise has them pretty thoroughly blanketed. Between the two companies, they've got every town in Eastern Massachusetts.
Yep. After doing some more reading, that sank in. In fact, I'm thinking about writing a little more on this deal, particularly the Enterprise portion of it, at the risk of boring most of the readers of H2otown to tears.
But hey, I don't write this for the money, so if I want to write 18 stories about it, there's nobody to tell me no (although that might be a good argument for getting someone just for the purpose of telling me no).
What surprises me about most of the pieces on this, both in the Globe and the Herald is the almost complete lack of any detail about the private equity investors. They're really pulling all the strings here -- the deals, the structure, the timing -- are all up to them. Yet the stories are presented as if it's a deal between Charles Foster Kane style media moguls. If I write more on it, that's what I'll be focusing on: the money.
I bet Mark Jurkowitz will do a piece on it, and he'll have more space to work with than the people who are covering it at the Globe and the Herald, I think.
If you want to see some of what I'm looking at, watch this page.
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