The discussion about what New Media Investment Group Inc. paid for The Providence Journal will go on for quite a while.
Was $46 million an appropriate price?
Will there be more layoffs, as has happened at so many other GateHouse Media properties?
The answers to all these questions and others will come in time. But one thing we do know now is that it won’t be local ownership that takes over the region’s dominant news gathering organization.
In a front-page story that talks to the only other bidder to make it to the second round of discussions, PBN learns that the local bid was well short. In fact, one of the principals of the local group said that in the end they weren’t even in the ballpark and that GateHouse saw profit opportunities that the Rhode Island group could not realize.
This last piece of news is concerning, in that the Ocean State group’s goal was to support the local news gathering that makes a regional newspaper so valuable to the community.
Let us hope that in realizing its goal of increasing the profitability of The Providence Journal, GateHouse Media remembers that the newspaper is an important asset to the entire community. •