Dow Jones & Company Announces Sale of Essex County Newspapers.Business Editors SOUTH BRUNSWICK South Brunswick is the name of several places in the United States of America:
Dow Jones Dow Jones the best known of several U.S. indexes of movements in price on Wall Street. [Am. Hist.: Payton, 202] See : Finance & Company announced today that Ottaway Newspapers, Inc., has entered into a definitive 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 subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions and 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 The Gloucester Daily Times is a six-day (Monday through Saturday) evening daily newspaper published in Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA. The newspaper is published by Eagle-Tribune Publishing Company, a subsidiary of Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. 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 Operating Income The profit realized from a business' own operations. Notes: This would not include income from things such as investments in other firms. Also referred to as operating profit or recurring profit. 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. Tax implications of the sale have not yet been finalized, but Dow Jones estimates using about $30 million of its remaining $340 million capital loss carryforwards to offset capital gains on the sale, resulting in after-tax proceeds of about $61 million. Proceeds will be used to repay debt, repurchase shares and acquire additional community newspapers. The Company expects to record an after-tax special gain of about $34 million, or 40 cents per diluted share, in the second quarter related to the sale. Excluding the gain on sale, the transaction is expected to be modestly dilutive to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) A PostScript file format used to transfer a graphic image between applications and platforms. EPS files contain PostScript code as well as an optional preview image in TIFF, WMF, PICT or EPSI, the latter being an ASCII-only format. in 2002. Peter R. Kann, chairman and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. 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 (NYSE NYSE See: New York Stock Exchange : DJ; dowjones.com) publishes The Wall Street Journal and its international and online editions, Barron's and the Far Eastern Economic Review, Dow Jones Newswires Dow Jones Newswires is the real-time financial news organization owned by Dow Jones. Founded in 1882, its primary competitors are Bloomberg L.P. and Reuters. The company reports more than 420,000 subscribers -- including brokers, traders, analysts and fund managers -- as of July , 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 NBC in full National Broadcasting Co. Major U.S. commercial broadcasting company. It was formed in 1926 by RCA Corp., General Electric Co. (GE), and Westinghouse and was the first U.S. company to operate a broadcast network. of CNBC CNBC Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (artificial intelligence) CNBC Consumer News and Business Channel CNBC Congress of National Black Churches, Inc. television operations in Asia and Europe. Dow Jones also provides news content to CNBC and radio stations in the U.S. Information Relating To Forward-Looking Statements: This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated, including the company's ability to strengthen its portfolio of community newspapers, particularly given the difficulty of finding quality newspapers to acquire, and such other risk factors as may be included from time to time in the company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. |
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