M&A ACTIVITY HOT SPOT: WASHINGTON.

Citing a 55.3-percent increase in the number of newspaper mergers and acquisitions, comparing this year to last, New York City media investment bank Jordan Edmiston Group said last week that so far this year newspaper transactions have brought in almost $2.6 billion.

And the hits just keep on coming, as last week the venerable Journal Newspapers of suburban Washington, D.C., were sold to the owner of the San Francisco Examiner and the Washington Post crept closer to its goal of buying the on-line magazine Slate from Microsoft Corp.

Philip Anschutz, the reclusive Denver billionaire who bought the San Francisco free daily tabloid and a group of free weeklies in February, formed a new investment company, Clarity Media Group, and on Thursday bought Journal Newspapers Inc., which publishes three free daily suburban Washington papers.

No terms of the deal were revealed, but industry insiders estimated that the papers, which had been on the market for a while, probably fetched between $50 million and $75 million.

Ryan McKibben, the former president and publisher of the Denver Post, is heading up Clarity; he is the brother of Scott McKibben, the publisher of the Examiner. Both men had long careers with MediaNews Group Inc. of Denver.

McKibben told the Washington Post that, "We liked the suburban Washington market. We thought there is a lot of upside to these newspapers."

He told the paper that he expects that top management of the papers will stay in place and that there will be no layoffs. In fact, McKibben is planning to expand coverage and hire more reporters.

"We're making it a more complete newspaper," he said.

Newspapers, magazines and on-line news organizations reported last week that the Washington Post Co. was close to closing a deal with Microsoft to acquire Slate, the software giant's foray into publishing.

Founded in 1996 at the height of the dot-com boom, the Slate web site today has about 3.1 million unique visitors and recently won a National Magazine Award for general excellence. In July when it put the magazine up for sale, Microsoft said it was looking for "an owner where the rest of the businesses are more aligned."

The Post Co. -- which publishes not only the eponymous daily and Newsweek magazine, but also owns TV stations, cable franchises and the Kaplan Learning Centers -- apparently beat out The New York Times Co. and six other media behemoths on the way to the prize.

The Post Co. does have a number of relationships with Microsoft: the Newsweek web site is hosted on MSNBC -- the cooperative effort between the Seattle software company and the broadcaster -- which also has a news-sharing agreement with the Post. Additionally, Melinda French Gates, wife of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, was recently given a seat on the Post Co. board. French Gates and her husband are social friends of Warren Buffett, the Nebraska financier who not only owns 22 percent of the Post Co., and whose Berkshire Hathaway owns the New York newspaper, the Buffalo News.

The tenth-largest media M&A in the last nine months? According to Jordan Edmiston, Journal Register Co.'s acquisition of 21st Century Newspapers at a cool $415 million. It was also the largest newspaper M&A. Consumer books was the sector with the biggest gain in number of deals (up 111 percent), while on-line media was the top gainer in deal price: up 815.7 percent.