The owner of the Newark Post, Cecil Whig and the Star Democrat, Easton, Md. has acquired the Southern Maryland weeklies from the Washington Post, now owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.
Terms were not disclosed. Buyer is Minneapolis-based Adams Publishing Group.
Adams is essentially rebuilding the old Chesapeake Publishing Corp., which sold the southern Maryland weeklies a decade ago ago to the Post. The papers under the Adams umbrella operate under the name APG Chesapeake.
Adams appeared to pass on the purchase of the Washington Post’s Gazette newspapers that ring Washington, D.C. Those newspapers are to be shut down, resulting in the loss of 40 jobs.
Chesapeake, during must of its existence, was a tightly run group of dailies and small weeklies. At its height, Chesapeake had a stable of papers in an area extending from southern New Jersey to Williamsburg, Va.
“We are excited about the addition of this group into our family of newspapers in the Chesapeake Region. In fact, it is almost like a homecoming of sorts as many of these products and APG Media of Chesapeake were part of one company, Chesapeake Publishing and Printing, about a decade ago,” said APG Media of Chesapeake President David Fike. “This acquisition nearly doubles the size of our current business in the region and we see great synergies and opportunities bringing these two well-established groups back together again.”
Family owned Adams purchased the remains of the debt-laden former American Consolidated Media (ACM) minus newspapers in Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas that are now under the ownership of Dover Post owner Gatehouse.
American Consolidated was the result of the purchase of Chesapeake and other papers prior to the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 by an Australian radio company that took on bank loans to finance the deals.
As advertising revenues plunged, the company could not service the debt and lenders ended up with control of the company.
The Minnesota connections come from American Consolidated’s purchase of papers in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Those entities are now under the Adams umbrella, along with a group of small dailies and weeklies in Ohio. Adams has also added “bolt on” acquisitions that include the Dundalk Eagle near Baltimore and other papers and websites in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ohio.
By most accounts, APG has kept staffing stable, but but has not significantly beefed up the Whig and Post. In the case of the Whig’s home in Elkton, employment fell from 100 to a dozen or so under American Consolidated after a printing plant and other operations were moved to Easton and Texas while revenues plunged.
American Consolidated centralized composition, accounting and other operations in Texas, Maryland and Ohio. Adams, by contrast, is said to operate in a dccentralized manner.
Disclosure: The author was an employee of Chesapeake.
