Recent offer to buy N&R fell through

Published reports suggest a deal to buy the News & Record of Greensboro, as recently as last year, fell through.

An article in the February 13, 2009 edition of the Business Journal says the former publisher of the Raleigh News & Observer, Frank Daniels, offered to buy the paper from parent company Landmark Communications for $45 million. When the paper was on the offering block, the asking price was $75 million.

Since then, the company pulled the paper off the market due to the slumping economy, despite its successful sale of its Weather Channel property to NBC-Universal.

Coverage also available from the Greensboro Telegram.

G-T:

Daniels is the former publisher of the News & Observer daily newspaper in Raleigh. The News & Observer company was owned by the Daniels family for over 100 years before the daily newspaper was bought by McClatchy Newspapers in 1995 for $373 million. The Daniels family bought later The Pilot newspaper in Southern Pines after selling the Raleigh publication.

According to the TBJ article, Daniels and a North Carolina ownership group that included some of his relatives made an offer of $45 million for the Greensboro News & Record. Some of the potential buyers in the group included unnamed local investors in Guilford County.

A call to former mayor Jim Melvin of Greensboro last year by The Greensboro Telegram to confirm that a group of local investors was looking at buying the News & Record also did not reveal any of the potential local buyers. There had been speculation last summer that a group of investors in Guilford County were in talks to buy the News & Record.

"I was thinking we could get Greensboro for a low price and we began looking into it," Daniels said to the TBJ.

Maybe they should've taken the deal.

E.C. :)