Hearst Corporation, in the US, has acquired seven weekly news brands from Hersam Acorn Newspapers, in Connecticut. This is the fifth bolt-on newspaper deal in two years by the privately-owned Hearst and emphasises its distinctive strategy. Over the past 60 years (almost half of the company’s lifetime since being founded by W.Randolph Hearst in 1887),…
Global radio bets big on outdoor
Global Media & Entertainment, the UK’s largest commercial radio company, has paid a reported £450m to acquire Exterion, the £370k-revenue outdoor advertising group which has a 20% share of outdoor advertising in the UK and also operates in Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Spain. It has the advertising contracts for the London underground and rail networks,…
Danson does it again with data
Quick read. Mike Danson is the maddening Brit who, in 2007, sold Datamonitor to Informa for £502m, only to buy it back eight years later for just £25m. Now, he’s busy building another billion dollar research and data business, GlobaData Plc. But, meanwhile, he has just splashed $31.5m on a 12,000 sq ft, six-storey home…
End of road for Johnston Press
Quick read. Johnston Press (JP), the heavily indebted UK news group behind the i, The Scotsman, The Yorkshire Post and around 200 other titles, has (finally) put itself up for sale. The group’s collapse perfectly illustrates the decline of the regional newspaper market in the past decade. In 2006, the company had 8,823 employees and…
Skift on the runway
Quick read. Skift Inc, the five-year-old global travel industry platform, has acquired Airline Weekly, of Florida, for a modest price that is believed to be principally geared to future profits and shares. Airline Weekly (AW) was founded in 2004 and publishes a subscription weekly ‘magazine’ emailed as a PDF. Curiously, it even looks like a…
DC Thomson ‘quietly’ buys magazines
Quick read. DC Thomson, the Scotland-based, family-owned media group, has acquired the UK specialist magazine publisher Aceville, which has more than 30 brands across crafts, gardening, health and food, together with a growing B2B portfolio. The estimated £20m deal shines a light on a little-known publisher which has piled up impressive magazine sales and digital…
Meredith gets ‘trophy’ price for Time
Quick read. Eight months after its acquisition of Time Inc., Meredith Corp is selling Time Magazine to Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne – for $190m. The Benioffs are buying it personally (not through Salesforce) and say they won’t play a role in daily operations or editorial decisions. The sale process for Time and the other…
Will top 2 Aussie mag groups merge?
Quick read. Australia’s newly-relaxed media ownership laws are likely to permit the country’s two largest magazine publishers to merge, even though Bauer Media Australia (formerly ACP Magazines) and Pacific Magazines (owned by Kerry Stokes’s TV-digital-print Seven West group) have a combined market share of more than 80%. That’s how far magazines have slipped down the…
Burda snaps up BBC Good Food
Quick read. The German-owned Immediate Media, of the UK, has acquired the BBC Good Food brand including the magazine, digital and live events businesses, with which it has had an agency relationship since much of the company’s portfolio was originally spun-out of the BBC in 2011. Immediate claims the deal makes it the “largest food…
Has Future (finally) found its way?
The history of American magazines can be defined by the 96 years of Time Inc which was this year ignominiously swallowed by out-of-towner Meredith. In the UK, Time’s former subsidiary (long known as IPC) provided a similar backdrop. But, for many Brits, the most dramatic picture of magazine fortunes for the past 30 years has…
