Irvine-based Freedom Communications Inc., parent of the Orange County Register, is looking to follow up its recent acquisition of five Arizona newspapers with another pending buy.
Freedom officials said they are in talks for a daily paper in the Midwest but declined to name the paper or a specific location.
The pending acquisition would follow on the heels of Freedom’s biggest deal to date, according to estimates. On June 29, Freedom said it is buying three daily papers and one group of weeklies in Arizona from Canada’s Thomson Corp. for an estimated $200 million.
The deal tops one in January 1998 for $170 million when Freedom bought WWMT-TV, a CBS affiliate in Grand Rapids/Kalamazoo, Mich., and WLAJ-TV, an ABC affiliate in Lansing, Mich.
The Arizona purchase is for the Scottsdale and Easy Valley Tribune, in Mesa, the Daily News-Sun, in Sun City, the Yuma Daily-Sun and a group of five non-daily newspapers. It adds 800 employees to Freedom for a total of 7,800. The papers stand to boost yearly sales by about 8% to $835 million, the company said.
“We think there are no better growth areas than Phoenix and Yuma,” said Jonathan Segal, President of Freedom Community Newspapers. “They are growing at three times the national average.”
Segal now heads up the company’s 26 dailies and eight weeklies, excluding the flagship Register and its weeklies, which are under N. Christian Anderson III.
With a combined circulation of 130,000, the Arizona papers give Freedom overall circulation of more than 1 million subscribers. The purchase is expected to be complete in the third quarter.
Thomson, whose 1999 revenue was $5.8 billion, announced in February that it would sell all of its newspaper operations, except for Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail.
The sell-off,involving 54 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada,is part of Thomson’s strategy to focus on its business and professional information operations.
Along with its newspaper holdings, Freedom publishes 18 magazines, runs eight TV stations and more than 50 Web sites. n
