1:12 p.m. | Updated The New York Times Company, which last week announced that its chief executive would depart at the end of the year, is close to selling its regional newspapers to the Halifax Media Group, the company announced Monday.
The Times Company’s Regional Media Group consists of 16 newspapers and related Web sites in places like Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Petaluma, Calif. Combined, the local papers have a Monday-to-Friday circulation of 433,251 and 1,755 full-time employees.
The company’s Boston Globe and Boston.com have endured buyouts and staff reductions to cut budgets, but they are not among the regional news organizations being sold.
The company’s regional newspapers, which include The Sarasota Herald-Tribune and The Gainesville Sun, accounted for 11 percent of the Times’s $2.4 billion in revenue in 2010. Even as optimism for the digital plan at its The New York Times newspaper has grown, the regional publications have dragged, the steady decline driven by a lack of classified ads and a migration of readers to the Web.
From 2008 to 2009 advertising revenue at the Regional Media Group fell 30.2 percent, to $193 million. Ad revenue fell another 8.2 percent in 2010 to $177 million, according to the company’s 2010 annual report. Classified ads make up 28 percent of the advertisements in the Times Company’s regional papers.
The Daytona Beach, Fla.-based Halifax Media Group owns The Daytona-Beach News Journal, five other news organizations in Florida and other newspapers across the south. On Monday morning, the Halifax Group’s Web site listed all of the Times Company’s regional papers as its own, tipping off the media blogger Jim Romenesko.
On Thursday, the Times Company announced the departure of Janet L. Robinson, who had served as chief executive since 2004. She will continue to consult for the company, earning $4.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Times Company has divested itself of assets as it tries to focus on its anchor newspapers, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune. In July, the company sold more than half of its stake in the Fenway Sports Group, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, for $117 million.
A Times spokesman, Robert H. Christie, declined to comment.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 19, 2011
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the blogger Jim Romenesko as Romanesko.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=be06555e936d96c29e83475edbff9d63