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Judge Clears Way for Sale of O.C. Register Parent Company — But Not to L.A. Times Owner

Mar 21, 2016  •  Post A Comment

The sale of the parent company of the Orange County Register and Riverside Press-Enterprise can go ahead after a bankruptcy judge today approved the purchase by Digital First Media, the Los Angeles Times reports.

“The $52.3 million offer prevailed over a competing bid from the parent company of the Los Angeles Times, which faced an antitrust battle in its effort to build a media empire stretching from the Mexican border to Los Angeles,” the Times reports. “Although Tribune Publishing’s $56 million cash bid was the highest for the assets of Freedom Communications, the Santa Ana publishing company asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Mark S. Wallace to approve a sale to Digital First.”

Freedom reportedly indicated that it would run out of money before the proposed Tribune purchase could clear the anti-trust litigation. “An attorney for Tribune Publishing did not object to a sale to Digital First,” the Times notes.

The sale to Digital First, which owns more than 50 papers and is known for its cost-cutting, is expected to close by the end of this month.

digital-first-media

2 Comments

  1. Their cost-cutting couldn’t be any worse, nor any more ridiculous than that of BANG/Bay Area Newspaper” group which continues to “shed” reporters, writers, entire sections like their old Health weekly section and at the same time, have in-house writers who normally would just cover one topic covering subject matter and other topics regularly that they have zero expertise at. Meaning the horrific, amateur-hour Tony H who normally should just be relegated to the few gossip paragraphs crap section, and shouldn’t be attempting to review film, tv, concerts, inns, hotels, restaurants, etc nor be allowed to write about his kids(who no one cares about). His style is still I, I, I, Me, Me, Me. A tiny fish in any even tinier pond. And there’s a few others too like Angela H who’s writing also doesn’t appear to have graduated from any accredited journalism school. Yet after buying up, absorbing(allegedly) so many other NorCal newspapers and ruining them all(the Oakland Trib is basically since BANG took them all over-the same daily newspaper just with different, faux mastheads for each city and minus a few local area differences. So the CC Times is basically the same rag as the Fremont Argus, the SJ Mercury, etc newspapers). And starting April 1st, it gets worse as there will only be two total newspapers. Some of the columns one pays for in the for-pay newspapers are included at no charge in their weekly, birdcage-liner free weekly regional “Hills” newspapers like the Alameda Journal(which has little to do with Alameda, the Montclarion for the B’Ley/Oakland area, etc).

    At least the OC Register remains a decent newspaper and is worth reading each day. Certainly it isn’t the L.A. Times but then the TImes itself(and I read them all daily) has lost sections, writers, columnists too and isn’t the newspaper I grew up with from the 50’s on. Everyone’s been hard hit save the WSJ and NY Times and even USA Today who seem basically unscathed so far.

    As always, just my opinion and what I(and many others) believe to be the truth

  2. And how’s this for ripoff city…when BANGroup took over, conglomerated, lumped together all those newspapers; anyone who was paying for a 7 day/week delivery to their home or business got screwed. They decided to cut even more costs and save internal money; they’d stop delivering on Mondays. I was a paid subscriber at the time, and they didn’t offer any refund for the Mondays they refused to deliver. Nor would they increase the amount of Monday newspapers sold at area markets and drug stores so everyone ran out of the Monday edition by 7 am here. Add in there have been multiple reports of unethical behavior by the 4 people “responsible” for delivering the BANG newspapers for example in my newspaper(the Oakland Trib which was once separate from the Alameda TImes Star) as well as attempting to deliver the WSJournal and USA Today by a “Jonny” character who’s been filmed by store owners especially along Park Street-our main street, stealing all the NY Times from stores before they open(the store owners reported to police that they believe he’d then sell them elsewhere although the NY Times wasn’t a newspaper they were responsible for delivering) along with ripping off said stores each week, claiming he left more newspapers than he actually did. Store owners said they began checking and found out they were getting ripped off $35 and much higher/week by this thief. This same scumbag removed and DID NOT deliver the monthly WSJ Magazine in the Saturday editions and even people with WSJ home delivery claim they never received the magazine that’s supposed to be included free of charge to purchasers. In closing, have never seen this kind of garbage occurring in SoCal with either the L.A. Times, the OC Register or even the LA Daily News or Daily Breeze newspapers.

    The above criminal activity has been all over area media recently and hopefully BANG will do the right thing and find a new carrier, distributor.

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