Target Report: Newspaper Buyers Move Above the Fold

For 15 years, The Target Report has examined M&A activity across the printing, packaging and related graphic communications industries. Last July, I invited our first-ever guest author of The Target Report, Sara April, President of Dirks, Van Essen & April, to provide a closer look at the market for local newspapers, an industry that remains closely connected to the broader printing business.

That connection is particularly personal for Sara. She grew up with a sheetfed printing press in the basement of her family home, where her parents operated a small print shop. The tell-tale smell of ink and blanket wash meant home to her. After joining Dirks, Van Essen & April in 2006, she went on to spend the next 20 years working on newspaper transactions and touring pressrooms across the country, from the Boston Globe’s iconic facility on Morrissey Boulevard and the flexo press that ran in Atlantic City to a tiny basement pressroom in Minnesota with a dirt floor. Every newspaper had its own story, dedicated crew, and lore. One even had a gun safe filled with silver bars.

The newspaper industry has changed dramatically during that time. Print circulation and advertising revenue have declined, production has consolidated, and many local publishers have struggled with rising costs and limited scale. Those changes have directly affected newspapers’ ancillary commercial printing operations, helped drive the growth of regional printing hubs, and rippled upstream to paper manufacturers, while also reshaping who owns and operates local news organizations.

I asked Sara to return as a guest author of The Target Report this July to provide an update on newspaper transactions and, more importantly, to step back from the individual deals and consider what the activity says about the changing nature of newspaper ownership. As she explains below, one of the most striking features of today’s market is not simply that newspapers continue to change hands, but the remarkably varied group of people and organizations that still want to own them.

– Mark

The Buyers Are the Story

By Sara April, Guest Author

For years, consolidation was one of the easiest ways to describe newspaper M&A. A relatively small group of well-capitalized newspaper companies acquired independent publishers, assembled regional clusters, consolidated production and administrative functions, and built scale.

That is still happening. But after looking at the transactions we have completed and tracked over the past year, what strikes me is how incomplete that description has become. So far in 2026, we have tracked 42 separate transactions involving more than 120 titles and 36 different buyers. In 2025, 172 titles changed hands in 62 transactions involving 52 buyers. The number that interests me most is not the number of newspapers sold. It is the number of buyers.

Of the 36 buyers in our 2026 transaction log, only four have completed more than one acquisition. Nelson Media Company and CherryRoad Media each have completed three, while Forum Communications Company and Times Media Group have completed two. The remaining 32 buyers appear only once.

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That does not look much like the consolidation cycles of the past, when two or three companies could account for a significant portion of the newspapers sold in a given year. Instead, newspaper M&A today increasingly resembles a market in which each property must find its own next owner.

Different Buyers, Different Reasons

There is no longer a standard profile of a newspaper buyer. Traditional newspaper companies remain active. Paxton Media Group, CherryRoad Media, Forum Communications, Times Media Group and others continue to acquire publications that fit their geographic footprints and operating strategies. For example, USA Today Co. (formerly known as Gannett) acquired an additional newspaper in Michigan, while the Chicago Tribune acquired the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.

The Daily Herald transaction is a particularly interesting example of how newspaper consolidation has evolved. The publication traces its roots to 1872 and remained under four generations of Paddock family ownership before becoming employee-owned through an ESOP in 2018. Its eventual sale to the Chicago Tribune followed an earlier transaction in which the Tribune acquired the Daily Herald’s Schaumburg production facility in 2023 and became its printer and distributor. In that case, production consolidated before ownership did.

But traditional newspaper companies represent only one category of buyer today. Our 2026 list includes the new breed of nonprofit journalism organizations, individual entrepreneurs, local business owners, newly formed media companies and even chambers of commerce.

NEWSWELL, the nonprofit local-news organization affiliated with Arizona State University, took ownership of four Chicago-area community newspapers donated by Growing Community Media. Its model combines locally focused journalism with shared business, technology and revenue resources across its network. The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, the nonprofit behind the Baltimore Banner, acquired the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after 99 years of Block family ownership. The Georgia Trust for Local News acquired newspapers in Macon and Columbus.

In Missouri and Louisiana, local chambers of commerce have become newspaper owners. Other publications have gone to individual buyers or small organizations whose names would never have appeared on a list of national newspaper consolidators a decade ago. This is the part of the market I continue to find remarkable. The economic challenges facing local newspapers are well documented, yet the buyer universe has not contracted to a small circle of industry specialists. In many ways, it has expanded.

Local Value Creates Local Buyers

One reason may be that the value of a community newspaper is not necessarily measured the same way by every buyer. A large newspaper company may see opportunities for regional scale, shared management, centralized production, or broader advertising relationships. An entrepreneur may see an underperforming business that can be rebuilt. A nonprofit may value the civic function of local journalism. A local family or community organization may view the newspaper as an institution worth preserving. Those motivations can lead to very different valuations and very different transaction structures.

The July acquisition of the Chattanooga Times Free Press by the Fuller family illustrates the point. The 157-year-old newspaper, which helped launch the career of Adolph S. Ochs before he purchased The New York Times in 1896, is returning to local ownership after being acquired from WEHCO Media. The Fullers are not traditional newspaper consolidators. They are one of Chattanooga’s best-known entrepreneurial families, associated with businesses including U.S. Xpress, Covenant Transport, Transcard, FreightWaves, and Firecrown Media. Their investment thesis is therefore different from that of a newspaper chain adding another property to an existing cluster. Craig Fuller has said the objective is to restore the Times Free Press to profitability while investing in the publication for future generations.

The combination of economic discipline paired with local commitment is increasingly important in newspaper transactions.

A Different Kind of Consolidation

None of this means consolidation has ended. Newspapers still need scale. Printing and distribution continue to consolidate. Administrative functions are shared across larger footprints. Regional operators continue to build clusters because the economics often work better when management, production and other costs can be spread across multiple publications. But ownership itself is becoming more varied.

Of the transactions we have tracked to date this year, a remarkable 37 out of 42 involve community newspapers. Only four are classified as regional transactions and one as national. The center of M&A activity remains the small and midsized local publication, where ownership transitions are often as much about succession as consolidation. That changes the role of the transaction process. Selling a newspaper today is often not simply a matter of finding the highest multiple from another newspaper company. It can mean identifying the buyer whose resources, geography, operating capabilities, or community commitment best fit a particular publication.

For longtime family owners, that distinction matters. Many are selling businesses that have been associated with their families for generations. The newspaper may employ longtime staff members, occupy a highly visible place in town, and carry a public responsibility that feels different from selling most other businesses. Finding the next owner can therefore become part financial transaction, part succession planning, with an added dose of community responsibility.

A Durable Shift

The newspaper industry has spent much of the past two decades talking about what it has lost: circulation, advertising revenue, classified advertising, print frequency and, in many communities, newspapers themselves. Those losses are real.

But M&A activity reveals another side of the story. There are still people willing to invest their money, time, and reputations in local news. Some are established newspaper companies. Others are entrepreneurs, nonprofits, local families, civic organizations, or buyers entering the business for the first time. A year ago, I wrote about the unusually broad pool of newspaper buyers. I expected that diversity to continue. What I did not necessarily expect was for it to become such a durable feature of the market. It has.

The most interesting question in newspaper M&A today may therefore no longer be: Who is consolidating the industry? Increasingly, it is: Who wants to own this particular newspaper, and why? The answers differ from one community to the next. And that may ultimately be one of the reasons local newspapers continue to find new owners.

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View The Target Report online, complete with deal logs and source links for July 2026

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