Fresh off a flurry of sales of newspapers in Texas and the Midwest, the Orange County Register's owner Freedom Communications reveals it has sold 20 more papers in Florida and North Carolina.
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In a deal expected to close in 20 days, the papers are being acquired by
Halifax Media Group of Daytona Beach, Fla., which has been snatching up
fish wraps about as quickly as Irvine-based Freedom has been dumping
them.
Freedom Communications Sells MORE Papers That Are Not the Register
Orange County Register's Freedom Overlords Sell 8 TV Stations to Conservative Concern
In fact, Halifax in December bought 16 regional papers from the New York Times Co. for $143 million, and combined with its previous holdings and the Freedom newspapers, Halifax is poised to be a major print media force in the Southeast.
Details of the Freedom sale were not disclosed, but a statement from Chief Operating Officer Mark
McEachen (pinch hitting for CEO Mitch Stern) was:
Providing value for our shareholders was a major goal of this
transaction, and others that we've undertaken recently. At the same time, we
wanted to make sure that current employees would transition to the new
owner and that the new owner shared our view of the importance of
community journalism.
Not a peep yet on what had been deemed a looming sale of the Register to the owner of the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Register Either Close or Extremely Close to Being Bought by Union-Tribune Publisher
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.