Washington Post Co to sell The Herald to Black Press Ltd
07 Feb 2013
The Washington Post Company (WPC) today said it has signed an agreement to sell The Herald, a daily and the Sunday newspaper and its other print and online products to Black Press Ltd and its subsidiary Sound Publishing.
The sale also includes Seattle paper La Raza, a weekly Spanish-language newspaper.
WPC did not disclose the financial terms of the deal but said that the transaction is expected to close in early March 2013.
The move comes a week after the WPC said that it was planning to sell its headquarter building in the heart of Washington DC and two shipping terminals in Old Town Alexandria.
''Over the years, as the newspaper business has changed, having it as our sole operation on the West Coast was not sound business strategy,'' the Washington Post paper reported, citing Ann McDaniel, a vice president at WPC, who helped negotiate the deal. ''Sound Publishing and Black Press expressed an interest; we saw an opportunity to preserve the company and most of the jobs, and we decided to move forward with this.''
Black Press publishes more than 170 newspapers, including the daily Akron Beacon-Journal in Ohio and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in Hawaii.
Canada-based Sound Publishing, a subsidiary of Black Press, is the largest community media organisation in Washington State, with 39 newspaper titles and a combined circulation of 732,700.
WPC did not give any reasons for the sale, but the company had debt of $467 million in the third quarter of 2012.