WASHINGTON - The owner of Roll Call is buying Congressional Quarterly in a deal that will bring two well-known publications covering Capitol Hill and Washington politics under the same corporate umbrella.
Terms of the deal, announced yesterday, were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter.
The combined company, to be called CQ-Roll Call Group, has no plans to eliminate any existing publications.
Roll Call is owned by Roll Call Inc., a unit of The Economist Group, a privately held company based in London that also publishes The Economist and CFO magazines.
Congressional Quarterly is currently owned by Times Publishing Co. of St. Petersburg, Fla., which also publishes the St. Petersburg Times, a daily newspaper in the Tampa Bay area. Times Publishing Co. is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg.
Roll Call and CQ play very different roles in the small world inside the Beltway, but are political news outlets considered must-reads by lawmakers, policy makers, and lobbyists.
