(Reuters) – The New York Times Co said it will sell 16 regional newspapers spread across the U.S. Southeast and California to Halifax Media Holdings for $143 million in cash as it looks to cut costs and focus on its most important papers and their websites.
Regional newspapers have struggled recently because of weak local retail and national advertising, partly reflecting the economy’s broader travails.
The company said it will record an after-tax gain of $150 million on the sale — expected to close in a few weeks — in the first quarter of 2012.
“I think that it’s toward the low end of what we expected. I was expecting $150-$200 million,” Evercore Partners analyst Douglas Arthur told Reuters.
“What it implies is that margins on regional newspapers were not as high as we thought, but the underlying profitability of the main New York Times is higher.”
The analyst, however, said pension obligation will stay with the company and that could be one of the uses of the proceeds.
The group to be hived off has a
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