The New York Post reports GateHouse, which owns more than 700 publications, including the Neosho Daily News, Pittsburg Morning Sun, Aurora Advertiser and The Big Nickel in this area and the Columbia Tribune and nearly two dozen newspapers in Missouri, is prepared to buy the larger Gannett company.
“There’s about a 75% chance it happens,” a source said.
There are complicated issues that remain, including GateHouse’s assumption of Gannett’s pension liabilities, a source said. Software integration is potentially another headache.
The source added that a deal was supposed to have been completed about two weeks ago.
GateHouse is owned by Fortress Investment, a hedge fund and has made a practice of buying newspapers, cutting their staffs to the bone (and even more), and leaving them shells of what they were or closing them altogether, as it did with the Carthage Press.
I always find these posts interesting. You always bash the big companies, but you are always afraid to make a comment or post saying what you would do to make the smaller papers run in todays free news environment and still be profitable.
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