Tuesday, November 28, 2006

King County Journal may close

The King County (WA) Journal's new owner says it will decide in the next few weeks whether to close the struggling suburban daily.

"We want to take one more look and see if there's a way to save the paper," Don Kendall, vice president of Sound Publishing, said Monday.

Kendall also said his company, a subsidiary of Black Press of Victoria, B.C., sees "virtually unlimited potential" in seven local non-daily sister publications of the Journal, and plans to expand them next year.

Black Press is buying all 10 papers in the King County Journal Newspapers group: the daily Journal; two weeklies, the Mercer Island Reporter and Snoqualmie Valley Record; and seven papers published twice monthly and distributed by mail: the Auburn Reporter, Bellevue Reporter, Bothell/Kenmore Reporter, Covington/Maple Valley Reporter, Kent Reporter, Redmond Reporter and Renton Reporter.

Horvitz Newspapers, the outgoing owner, announced the deal Wednesday. Neither party has disclosed the price.

Kendall said Black bought the chain to get the seven Reporter papers, not the Journal. After Horvitz put the papers on the market this summer, "anyone except us who took a look at this group looked at the daily and stopped looking," he said.

Click on the headline to read the full story by Eric Pryne in the Seattle Times.

There is a nice graphic of Sound Publishing holdings accompanying the story.

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