Dow Jones Sells Essex County Newspapers

Posted on April 12, 2002

Dow Jones & Company announced that Ottaway Newspapers, Inc., has entered into an agreement to sell its Essex County Newspapers, to Eagle-Tribune Publishing Company. The purchase price for the properties is approximately $70 million, in cash. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the second quarter 2002.

The Essex County daily newspapers included in the transaction are The Salem Evening News, The Gloucester Daily Times and The Newburyport Daily News, all in Massachusetts. For the full year 2001, the Essex properties had combined revenues of $28 million and operating income of $6.8 million. Ottaway will continue to publish 12 daily and over 17 weekly newspapers in 10 states. Adjusted for this divestiture, as well as the four properties sold earlier this year, Ottaway had combined 2001 revenue of $273 million and daily circulation of about 384,000.

Peter R. Kann, chairman and CEO of Dow Jones & Company, said: "This transaction completes the process of divesting several of our Ottaway newspaper properties, and furthers our strategic priority of strengthening our Ottaway newspaper portfolio. Overall and over time, we expect to grow our Ottaway portfolio by being a net buyer of community newspaper properties."

James H. Ottaway, Jr., senior vice president of Dow Jones & Company, and chairman and CEO of Ottaway Newspapers, added, "We have decided to focus our future growth outside of Essex County, and to pursue newspaper acquisitions in other regions of the country. I thank the management and employees of these high quality newspapers for their dedicated service to readers and advertisers of the communities they serve. I am very pleased that the Eagle-Tribune Publishing Company, one of the best-managed family-owned community newspaper companies in the country, will be our successor as owner and publisher."

Dow Jones & Company publishes The Wall Street Journal and its international and online editions, Barron's and the Far Eastern Economic Review, Dow Jones Newswires, Dow Jones Indexes and the Ottaway group of community newspapers. Dow Jones is co-owner with Reuters Group of Factiva, with Hearst of SmartMoney and with NBC of CNBC television operations in Asia and Europe. Dow Jones also provides news content to CNBC and radio stations in the U.S.