By: Mark Fitzgerald A local group including the paper's managing editor has reached a tentative agreement to buy the Madera (Calif.) Tribune from Pacific-Sierra Publishing Co. Inc.
Tribune Managing Editor Charles "Chuck" Doud, who will become the paper's publisher when the sale closes, said the transaction is expected to be complete within a few weeks. Doud told E&P he will be the only current employee participating in the new closely held ownership group, Madera Printing and Publishing Co. Inc. Doud described the ownership as mostly local businesspeople plus "a couple of southern California" investors familiar with the newspaper business. No other details are being released, he said.
Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, a newspaper merger-and-acquisition firm located in Santa Fe, N.M., represented Pacific-Sierra Publishing in the transaction.
With the sale of the 4,500-circulation, Monday-through-Saturday Tribune, only one daily still remains inside the Pacific-Sierra chain, the Turlock (Calif.) Journal.
The break-up of the group will also change operations at the Tribune, Doud said. For the past several year, the newspaper was printed by the Merced Sun-Star, which Pacific-Sierra sold to The McClatchy Co. in December. "McClatchy has very kindly been printing us, but that arrangement is going to end," he said. "We'll be buying presses. We're calling it 'going back to the future.'"
The Tribune is a profitable and "stable operation," Doud said. "We anticipated some bumps, but so far the bumps have been much less than we thought," he said.
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