Investor unit sees profits from news
NORTH ANDOVER -- The pending sale of Eagle-
In the last eight years, at least six investment companies have been created solely to invest in newspapers, said Dennis F. Herrick, a journalism lecturer at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who identified the trend in a 2003 book. In the Eagle-Tribune's case, the investor is Community Newspaper Holdings Group, a Birmingham-based unit of Alabama's $26.6 billion state pension fund, Retirement Systems of Alabama.
David Bronner, chief executive officer of the Alabama pension fund, said the fund now has $1.4 billion invested in community newspapers. Noting the high profit margins of many newspapers and television stations, he said in an e-mail to the Globe, ''Unlike our billions in traditional stocks and bonds, these real assets are not subject to the ups and downs of Wall Street."
The Eagle-Tribune sale, which was announced in July and is scheduled to close Sept. 30, also reflects a nationwide trend of consolidation in the media industry. The price has not been disclosed, and the privately held Eagle-Tribune Publishing does not publicly report its financial results.
The family-owned company, headed by Irving E. ''Chip" Rogers III, acquired three daily papers for $70 million in Salem, Newburyport, and Gloucester in 2002. The company already owned six semiweekly and weekly papers, including the Andover Townsman and the Haverhill Gazette in Massachusetts, and the Derry News in New Hampshire. Some 700 people are employed by the company, which reaches 341,000 readers in 55 communities, according to Daniel J. Griffin, the company's vice president of marketing.
Although Rogers said in a 2002 Boston Globe article that he had no intention of selling the newly acquired papers, the Eagle-Tribune's purchase of the three North Shore papers had the effect of making the company more attractive as a target. Rogers declined to comment for this article.
In a statement to employees after the sale agreement was announced, Rogers said: ''During the past five years, we've built the company tremendously . . . and to stay on this track, we knew we needed to add significant production capacity or join a larger company with greater capacity."
Joyce Pellino Crane can be reached at crane@globe.com. 
