Ottaway Community Newspapers (also called Ottaway Newspapers, Inc.) is a subsidiary of News Corporation and owns newspapers, Web sites and niche publications in California, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania. It is headquartered in Campbell Hall, New York and its flagship is the Times Herald-Record.
The Ottaway organization was founded in 1936 and grew to nine newspapers in the northeastern United States by 1970, when it merged with Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.[1]
Ottaway became part of News Corp. when it bought Dow Jones for US$5 billion in in late 2007. Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp., reportedly told investors before the deal that he would be "selling the local newspapers fairly quickly" after the Dow Jones purchase.[2]
Holdings
Ottaway currently publishes eight daily and 15 weekly newspapers in seven U.S. states. Ottaway's circulation was given in 2005 as 282,000 daily, 316,000 Sunday and 119,000 daily unique visitors on newspaper Internet sites.[3]
Ottaway's daily newspapers are:
Ottaway weekly and twice-weekly newspapers include the following:
History
James H. Ottaway, Sr., founded the company in November 1936, when he purchased the Bulletin, a semi-weekly paper in Endicott, New York, that he converted to a daily within a year. Ottaway added the Oneonta Star in 1944, followed two years later by the Pocono Record.[1]
The company has been a seller more often than a buyer in the 2000s, however, and several observers -- including the New York Post, The Boston Globe and Ottaway's own Cape Cod Times -- have speculated that News Corporation intends to sell all or part of the company in the near future.[2]
Under Dow Jones' ownership, Ottaway sold several newspapers in recent years, however, most recently in December 2006, when the company dealt nearly half its daily newspapers to Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI) for $287.9 million (including real estate).[3]
Until December 2006, the following dailies and weeklies were also part of the Ottaway chain. They are all now part of CNHI.[3]
- Santa Cruz Sentinel daily of Santa Cruz, California
- The News-Times daily of Danbury, Connecticut
- The Spectrum weekly of Milford, Connecticut
- Record-Eagle daily of Traverse City, Michigan
- The Grand Traverse Herald weekly of Traverse City, Michigan
- Cooperstown Crier weekly of Cooperstown, New York
- Daily Star of Oneonta, New York
- Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, New York
- Daily Item of Sunbury, Pennsylvania
- The Danville News weekly of Danville, Pennsylvania
The following four daily newspapers were sold by Ottaway to CNHI for $182 million in 2002:[4]
Also, Ottaway sold the three daily newspapers of Essex County Newspapers Inc. to The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, Massachusetts, in 2002, for $70 million.[5] The Eagle-Tribune, along with the Essex papers listed below, was later purchased by CNHI.
External links
Footnotes
- ^ a b DowJones.com Community Media, accessed January 8, 2007.
- ^ a b "Ottaway Papers Might Be Sold, Including 16 in N.E.". NEPA Bulletin (Boston, Mass.), December 2007, page 3.
- ^ a b c "Dow Jones Completes Sale of Six Local Newspapers." Dow Jones & Company press release, December 5, 2006.
- ^ "Dow Jones To Sell Four Ottaway Newspapers", accessed January 8, 2007.
- ^ "Bay State Paper Gets to Grow in Its Own Backyard". NewsInc, April 22, 2002. Accessed January 8, 2006.
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