The mystery over our local daily’s new parents may have to have ended: According to Nieman Lab, GateHouse Media has purchased the Austin American-Statesman, which went up for sale last year by private owners Cox Media. The New York-based company holds 130 dailies and 640 community publications nationwide, as well as a digital marketing agency and event production company. While eyes were on media conglomerate Hearst Corp. – owners of several Texas dailies, including the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News – GateHouse bid around $50 million for the Statesman, five times the paper’s annual earnings (and more than Hearst’s bid), the journalism industry site reports. GateHouse owns nearly two dozen publications (including “shoppers”) in modest Texas markets, plus the Center for News and Design in Austin, a self-described “hub” for centralized page design, copy editing, and digital publishing for the company’s newspapers. Showing mixed feelings about the purchase, Statesman reporter Elizabeth Findell joked on Twitter that staff had responded to the sale by snacking on comfort sweets like “chocolate chip muffins” and “donut holes.”
A little more than a year after GateHouse acquired the family-owned Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri, the staff has been “slashed, readers are frustrated and circulation has plunged,” according to a recent article published in the Gateway Journalism Review: The Tribune “has been bled dry to achieve financial results.”
Cox had previously put the paper up for sale in 2008 and was courted by a group led by Walter Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, only to take it off the table in 2009. We reached out to both GateHouse Media and Statesman publisher Susie Gray Biehle, but calls were not returned.
This article appears in March 2 • 2018.