New Times to Buy LA Weekly Parent

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Village Voice Media, the owner of the LA Weekly, will be bought by New Times Media to create an alternative newspaper powerhouse with publications in 17 of the nation’s biggest markets.


Financial details were not disclosed.


Phoenix-based New Times Chief Executive Jim Larkin will be CEO and New Times Executive Editor Michael Lacey will be executive editor of the merged company, which will continue to use the name Village Voice Media. Village Voice Media CEO David Schneiderman was named president of Village Voice Digital, whose operations are expected to be expanded, Schneiderman said in an e-mail sent to LA Weekly staffers.


The closely held companies will continue to publish six Village Voice newspapers, including the flagship New York paper and the LA Weekly, and 11 New Times papers. Combined revenue of the merged entity would be about $180 million annually, the companies said in a statement.


The merger will likely take two to six months for the Justice Department to approve the deal. At issue in the review will be whether the new company would crowd smaller alternative weeklies out of the advertising market, the Village Voice said in a statement.


The department is expected to review the merger closely also because the two firms ended up in a federal consent decree after their last transaction raised anti-trust issues; New Times closed its Los Angeles paper in 2002 as part of the deal, in which the two companies split the Los Angeles and Cleveland markets.


The staff at New Times is not organized, but the union contracts for workers at the Village Voice and the LA Weekly will be honored, according to a story about the merger on the Village Voice Web site.


Since 2000, the Voice and its sister papers LA Weekly, OC Weekly, Seattle Weekly, Minneapolis City Pages, and Nashville Scene have been owned by a consortium that includes Goldman Sachs, investment bankers Weiss, Peck & Greer, and the Trimaran Fund.


Village Voice Media will have a total weekly circulation of about 1.8 million newspapers and 4.3 million readers.

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