NY investors buy local paper chain

Liberty Group Publishing Inc. – which owns newspapers and publications in Joplin, Neosho, Waynesville and Rolla – has sold its assets to New York-based Fortress Investment Group LLC.

Liberty, based in Northbrook, Ill., owns more than 300 publications, including 66 daily newspapers; 20 of its publications are in Missouri.

Rick Rogers, publisher of the Neosho Daily News, said the purchase shouldn’t have much effect on the daily operations of individual publications. Neosho Daily News reported the acquisition June 7.

“The readers shouldn’t notice any changes,” Rogers said. “The purchase with Fortress is basically an operating change for the company; it’s not necessarily going to affect any changes here locally.”

Officials for both Liberty Group and Fortress Investment Group were unavailable for comment by press time.

Group trends

The trend toward group ownership of community papers in Missouri is not so much about the influx of large media conglomerates as it is the need to consolidate in order to survive, said Jim Sterling, a professor of newspaper management at University of Missouri-Columbia. Sterling is a former newspaper broker and publisher.

“What you see is people owning more than one paper, because in some of the smaller towns there’s not enough revenue there to make it go,” he said. “But you can own two or three papers in area towns that are close to each other, and then you put together a package that you can live on and put out a good newspaper for those communities.”

Of Missouri’s 296 newspapers, 246 are weeklies.

Sterling, who previously owned three small weekly papers in southwest Missouri – Bolivar Herald-Free Press, Buffalo Reflex and Cedar County Republican – said the trend toward group ownership of daily papers is declining but not due to more independent publishers.

“Today, a lot of the newspapers are owned by groups, and (groups have) gone beyond buying dailies into buying the weeklies,” Sterling said. “Mainly it’s because they’ve run out of dailies to buy – either they won’t sell or they’ve already sold.”

An example is Bentonville, Ark.-based Community Publishers Inc., which owns eight Missouri papers, including weekly publications in Bolivar, Buffalo, Christian County, Republic and Marshfield.

Fortress Investment Group, founded in 1998, has its headquarters in New York with offices in several international cities including London, Paris and Rome. The company has more than $15 billion in equity capital under management, according to its Web site.

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