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It’s Post Time
Bridgeport daily, Brooks papers go to MediaNews Group of Denver
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Business New Haven
8/7/2000
By: BNH
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The Toronto-based Thomson Corp. has agreed to sell its largest U.S. daily, the Connecticut Post, as well as four Fairfield County weeklies to MediaNews Group Inc. of Denver.
Earlier this year the $5.8 billion Thomson said it would seek buyers for all its newspaper properties save for its flagship Toronto Globe & Mail in order to concentrate on e-information and solutions. With the July 12 announcement regarding the Post, Thomson has now identified buyers for all 49 of its U.S. dailies. The company has five Canadian newspapers yet to sell.
Thomson said that the sale of its American papers had raised a total of $2.44 billion.
Owner of the Denver Post and Los Angeles Daily News, MediaNews is the nation's seventh-largest newspaper group, with daily circulation of about two million. The Post deal would give it 48 dailies and 87 non-dailies in 13 states.
MediaNews said it would finance the acquisition using proceeds from its recent sale of four dailies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and 40 non-daily papers to Advance Publications.
The Post deal is expected to close on or about October 1.
The four non-dailies included in the Post sale are the Westport News, Fairfield Citizen-News, Norwalk Citizen-News and Darien News-Review, which do business under the Brooks Community Newspapers Banner.
Thomson purchased the then-Bridgeport Post in 1988, and the Brooks papers just last year.
The Post has a circulation of 79,048 daily, and 89,760 Sunday. The combined circulation of the four Brooks papers is 36,526.
Following Thomson's divestiture announcement, media industry observers had speculated that the Post might become the subject of a bidding war between the Tribune Co. - which earlier this year acquired Times-Mirror, publisher of the Hartford Courant - and the Trenton, N.J.-based Journal Register Co. (JRC), which owns the New Haven Register. At this point, however, most Wall Street observers view the debt-laden JRC as a likely seller, not a buyer.
MediaNews has acquired 13 papers from Thomson. The Post and Brooks papers mark the company's first foray into Connecticut, although it also owns the Berkshire Eagle and Lowell Sun in the neighboring Bay State.
With its home base in Connecticut's largest city, the Post is the state's third-largest daily, behind the 200,000-circulation Courant and the 90,000-circulation Register.
In Bridgeport to announce the deal, MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton said no layoffs or management changes were foreseen at the Post.
“I don't need to change anything other than to keep growing it,” said Singleton in a statement.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
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