MediaNews buys Santa Cruz Sentinel after all

MediaNews, owners of nearly every Bay Area daily (except the Chronicle) as well as the weekly Pacifica Tribune have bought the Santa Cruz Sentinel after all.  Three months ago, Dow Jones sold the paper to Community Newspaper Holdings as part of a package of papers, and now CNH has resold the Sentinel to MediaNews.

"We are delighted to acquire the Santa Cruz Sentinel and expand our reach in this very competitive region," MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton said in a statement. "The Sentinel is a fine newspaper today but will be strengthened by the resources of our existing newspapers."

Which means that they’ll be reprinting more stuff from Singleton’s other Bay Area papers, rather than doing the journalism themselves.

The Chron has also been working closely with MediaNews, according to the SF Bay Guardian, trying to consolidate some back office operations, in a move that has raised some antitrust concerns. Hearst, owners of the Chron, would also like to invest in MediaNews, according to a report in the Chron, where church and state are apparently still separate:

According to a July 26, 2006, memo to Ganzi from two top Hearst executives, if Hearst were to win approval to invest directly in all of MediaNews, including the Bay Area assets, it would own approximately 24 percent of MediaNews based on the company’s value that day, while Singleton and Richard Scudder, his co-founder, would each own approximately 34 percent. Institutional shareholders and Lodovic own the rest of the private company.

Meanwhile, MediaNews is exploring putting front-page ads in the Mercury News and other former Knight-Ridder papers in the Bay Area. It is already doing this with its Alameda Newspaper Group papers:

"We are examining the option of having front page and section front ads for the Mercury News and the Contra Costa papers," said John Armstrong, publisher of the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, Calif. and vice president of the California Newspapers Partnership, which includes all of MediaNews’ California dailies. "We are exploring advertiser interest in various options for section front ads and Page One ads. We would like to get something done in the next few months."