The Washington Post Co. has signed an agreement to sell The Herald, the Everett, Wash., daily newspaper it has owned since 1978, to Black Press of Canada and its U.S. subsidiary Sound Publishing for an undisclosed amount.
The sale will include The Herald’s other print and online products.
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Founded in 1975, Black Press is a private chain with more than 170 small community newspapers concentrated in British Columbia, Alberta and Washington State. The company also owns the Honolulu (Hawaii) Star-Advertiser and Akron (Ohio) Beacon-Journal daily newspapers.
While most big newspaper companies are contracting, Black Press has expanded. In a 2008 profile of the company’s founder, David Holmes Black, the Seattle Weekly said that around a million households in the state of Washington would have a paper owned by Black “land in their front yard” or buy one at a newsstand.
The Post does not break out separate financial figures for The Herald. Last year, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that The Herald’s Sunday circulation increased to 50,795 in March from 49,115 a year earlier, up 3.3 percent. Its weekday circulation dropped by a similar percentage, but the performance was better than most of the country’s major dailies.
According The Post’s most recent annual report, The Daily Herald Company, which employs 67 people, is also a regional print site for USA TODAY. Everett is about 30 miles north of Seattle. The company publishes a weekly community newspaper that is home delivered in south Snohomish County; La Raza del Noroeste, a weekly Spanish- language newspaper; and the Snohomish County Business Journal, a monthly publication focused on Snohomish County business news.
In her 1997 memoir, the late Katharine Graham, then chairman of The Post, wrote that the acquisition of The Herald in 1978 was part of a “larger plan to acquire several smaller newspapers which never materialized.”
She said The Herald was poorly appraised. “We paid a monopoly price for a paper that was in a somewhat competitive situation with Seattle and then proceeded not to run it well until recently, when it has been vastly improved,” she wrote.
The news follows announcements by The Post that it would also sell two shipping terminals in Old Town Alexandria and consider a sale of its headquarter building in northwest Washington.
The Post said that it expects the sale of The Herald to close in early March.
