Murdoch will probably sell Ottaway Newspapers, industry analysts say

Rupert Murdoch will probably sell the Ottaway Newspapers subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co. because community newspapers are not his line of business, say industry analysts, most recently the editor-at-large of Editor and Publisher. "My guess is, prepare for a sale. It's really not the kind of paper he operates in the United States, or even the kind he operates in Australia or the U.K," Mark Fitzgerald told Sarah Shemkus of the Cape Cod Times, Ottaway's third-largest daily paper, with a circulation of 44,000.

Ottaway publishes eight dailies and 15 weeklies. The dailies are the 80,000-circ. Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y., and The Record of Stockton, Calif., 59,000, both with substantial rural readerships; The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass, 32,000; the Mail Tribune of Medford, Ore, 31,000; the Pocono Record of Stroudsburg, Pa., 19,500; the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald, 12,300; The Ashland (Ore.) Daily Tidings, 5,010; and The Danville (Pa.) News, 2,623. Click here for a list of all Ottaway papers.

Ottaway was once a separate company. Its former chairman, James Ottaway Jr., controls about 7 percent of Dow Jones' stock and was an outspoken opponent of the sale to Murdoch's News Corp. Just as Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal reported forthrightly and comprehensively on the controversial sale, the Times added useful context to its coverage today, running a list of the 17 papers on and near Cape Cod and their owners.

Many industry observers have concluded "that News Corp. is likely to sell off the Ottaway newspapers quickly," Shemkus reports. "Possible suitors could include GateHouse Media, Colorado-based MediaNews Group Inc., and Alabama-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., according to Ken Doctor, who leads analysis of the news publishing industry for the California market research firm Outsell Inc." GateHouse, a fast-growing company, has four papers on Cape Cod, where Ottaway has three. CNHI's chief news executive, Bill Ketter, is based in Massachusetts, near most of the Ottaway papers.

One other "rural angle": A top industry analyst "said the dismantling of newspaper dynasties was reminiscent of the disappearance of small farms," report Joseph Menn and Thomas Mulligan of the Los Angeles Times, quoting John Morton: "It's like the farmer who leaves the farm to the family and divides it evenly. A couple of generations go by and all of a sudden you're sitting on an acre."