Sarasota newspaper's parent firm sold for $280M

SARASOTA — The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, the largest daily newspaper in the Sarasota-Bradenton market, has a new owner for the second time less than three years.

The new owner, according to a release, is New Media Investment Group, a New York City-based firm that publishes 450 community publications and 370 related websites in 27 states. New Media paid $280 million for Halifax Media Group, which publishes the Herald-Tribune and 35 other newspapers, including 24 dailies and the connected websites. Halifax Media Group, which also owned the Daytona Beach News-Journal, bought the Herald-Tribune from the New York Times Regional Media Group in December 2011.

New Media is managed by an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group, an industry giant with $66 billion of assets under management. The chairman of the board of New Media is Wesley Edens,
a onetime partner and managing director of Lehman Bros. and BlackRock Financial Management who co-founded Fortress in 1998. Edens bought the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks in May with a business partner for $550 million.

Most of Halifax's publications are in the Southeast United States, a market where New Media had no presence. The portfolio of Halifax publications, in total, has total daily circulation of around 635,000 and 752,000 on Sunday, according to the release. New Media has made other purchases over the past 15 months, including the Providence Journal in Rhode Island and the Dow Jones Local Media Group, which includes eight daily publications formerly owned by News Corp. New Media says its publications reach 14 million people a week.

New Media intends to fund the Halifax acquisition with a combination of cash on the balance sheet and incremental debt under its existing term loan, the release states. The deal is expected to close in the 2015 first quarter.

“This is a very exciting day for our company,” New Media President and CEO Michael Reed says in the statement. “Halifax Media is one of the premier, locally oriented media companies in the United States whose business fits extremely well within New Media.”