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IS ‘WESTWORD’ GOING UP FOR SALE?

Voice Media Group, parent company for Denverbased alt weekly Westword, has hired merger-andacquisition firm Dirks, Van Essen & Murray for what appears to be a possible sale of some or all of its newspapers.

Voice Media Group papers total a nationwide print distribution of 3 million, and their holdings include New York City’s The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Miami New Times, the Houston Press, Phoenix New Times, City Pages in Minneapolis, the Dallas Observer, the Riverfront Times in St. Louis, New Times Broward- Palm Beach and Denver’s Westword.

According to a report at Poynter.org titled “Village Voice parent company will explore sale of papers,” Dirks, Van Essen & Murray has been tasked with exploring “new strategies for its publishing assets.” The Poynter piece also notes this “is the typical language used when companies put their papers up for sale.”

“We continue to evaluate all of our properties while at the same time looking at new opportunities,” Scott Tobias, Voice Media Group chief executive officer, said in a release. “We will be making moves that fit our business plan and that set our business up for the most success today and in the future.”

Voice Media Group is working to “fine-tune its portfolio,” and diversify its holdings.

OC Weekly will be first in line for considering options for sale of the paper or opportunities for a local partnership. OC Weekly editor and writer of the syndicated column “Ask a Mexican” Gustavo Arellano posted word about the sale in his news blog “Navel Gazing.”

“On my end, anyone interested in buying this rag gets a motivated band of misfits, almost all of us OC natives loving to tell the best and worst of a land with 3 million souls,” he wrote. “We’ve been comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable for nearly 20 years, and we plan to do so no matter who may be our eventual papi or mami.”

PRIVATE EQUITY FIRMS IN TALKS TO BUY DENVER POST, DAILY CAMERA, TIMES CALL AND OTHER DIGITAL FIRST MEDIA NEWSPAPERS 

Digital First Media, the parent company of the Denver Post and majority owner in several Boulder County newspapers including the Daily Camera, Longmont Times-Call and Colorado Hometown Weekly is reportedly closing in on the sale of all 280 of its daily and weekly newspapers.

As reported in Boulder Weekly in April 2014, Digital First Media’s owner, Alden Global Capital — a venture capital firm specializing in the purchase of distressed businesses — had decided to unload all of its Digital First properties. Analysts at the time noted that even though Alden preferred to sell its entire Digital First holdings to a single buyer, it was unlikely that such a buyer would emerge considering the sorry state of the current daily newspaper market. Many observers therefore expected that the company would be sold off in regional blocks.

It now appears that the analyst may have been wrong. Bloomberg and other media sources are now reporting that two private equity firms, Cerberus Capital Management LP and Apollo Global Management, are currently in talks with Alden in separate attempts to purchase the entire Digital First portfolio, which includes Prairie Mountain Publishing the owner of the Daily Camera, Colorado Daily, Longmont Times-Call, Broomfield Enterprise, Loveland Reporter Herald, Fort Morgan Times, Journal-Advocate in Sterling, Lamar Daily News, Akron News-Reporter, Brush News-Tribune, The Burlington Record, Julesburg Advocate and the Estes Park Trail- Gazette.

Bloomberg reports that Alden is seeking somewhere between $480 and $625 million for its Digital First properties but notes that getting such a price is unlikely.

Respected media analyst Ken Doctor notes that generally, when private equity firms buy a distressed property, it is with the intent to slash expenses to improve profits in order to increase the resell value quickly. Doctor adds that Digital First had already cut its newspapers’ expenses to the bone, and it’s unclear where else the bidding companies could cut, aside from possibly cutting the number of issues per week that are produced.

As evidence of the mass consolidation that has already taken place under Digital First’s ownership, layoffs have been sizable and frequent since it purchased its papers out of bankruptcy a few years ago. Content from once competing newspapers in the region is now shared by all the papers and in recent weeks, reporter bylines no longer designate which newspaper the writer works for. Reporters from all the Digital First papers in Boulder County are now simply listed as “staff.” The lone exception are Denver Post writers who still maintain a Post byline on stories running in the Camera, Times-Call, etc.

The private equity bids for the whole company appear to be a blow for Philip Anschutz, owner of Clarity Media Group, who has made clear his desire to own the Denver Post and DF’s other Colorado newspapers. Anschutz currently owns several rightleaning newspapers including The Oklahoman and the Colorado Springs Gazette.

It’s still possible that the two bids for all the properties may be too low and Alden could reject them, choosing instead to sell off the regional clusters.

Whatever happens, it appears that sooner rather than later, all of Boulder County’s newspapers — with the exception of Boulder Weekly — will be owned by either an expense-slashing private equity fund or by one of the most politically conservative newspaper owners in America.

WYOMING INCREASES TRANSPARENCY IN FRACKING FLUID 

A settlement reached in a case filed by environmental organizations against the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and Halliburton Energy Services may make it more difficult for energy companies to maintain confidentiality about the chemicals used in fracking.

In 2010, Wyoming issued requirements to oil and gas companies to disclose the chemicals used for fracking, but the Oil and Gas Commission granted exemptions from that requirement as the industry claimed those chemicals were trade secrets. This settlement requires the Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission to provide more factual support for those claims.

“The reforms required by today’s settlement will ensure that oil and gas companies don’t get a free pass from public disclosure laws in Wyoming,” Earthjustice attorney Katherine O’Brien said in a press release.

Earthjustice represented the Powder River Basin Resource Council, Wyoming Outdoor Council, Earthworks and the Center for Effective Government in the suit.

“We believe the public has a right to know which chemicals are being injected underground during fracking,” said Wyoming Outdoor Council’s chief legal counsel Bruce Pendery in a release, and he called the agreement “another good step in that direction.”

DEMS PROPOSE A ‘DEATH WITH DIGNITY ACT’ FOR COLORADO 

Colorado House Democrats proposed a ‘Death with Dignity Act’ to allow terminally ill patients the right to make end-of-life decisions in cases of terminal illness. To qualify, an individual must be a Colorado resident with a terminal illness who is able to make and communicate health care decisions and voluntarily request medication that can be self-administered by ingestion. That request will have to be made twice orally as well as in writing on separate occasions — with 15 days between first and second oral requests as well as a mandatory waiting period before a physician can prescribe life-ending medication. The bill is sponsored in the state House by Reps. Lois Court (D-Denver) and Joann Ginal (D-Fort Collins) and in the state Senate by Sens. Lucía Guzmán (D-Denver) and Michael Merrifield (D-Colorado Springs).

RECESSION RECOVERY NOT REACHING 99 PERCENT OF COLORADANS 

Nearly half of Colorado’s income growth between 2009 and 2012 went to the wealthiest 1 percent of the state’s residents, according to a recently released report from the Economic Policy Institute. Numbers from the institute show that in 2012, that wealthiest 1 percent took home 27 times more than the other 99 percent, and the gap between average income and the top 1 percent in Colorado is 11th largest in the country. The average income for the top 1 percent is 27 times greater than the average — of $50,000 — for the bottom 99 percent.

The report, “The Increasingly Unequal States of America,” shows that after incomes at all levels decreased during the recession, since recovery began in 2009, the top 1 percent has been “capturing an alarming share of economic growth” — by some numbers, as much as 95 percent of that growth.

In Colorado, the numbers show the top 1 percent’s change in income between 2009 to 2012 is an increase of 48.4 percent, while the other 99 percent has seen income decrease by 1 percent.

“This study provides further confirmation that the state’s economic recovery has been lopsided at best,” Claire Levy, executive director of the Colorado Center on Law & Policy, said in a press release. “As the economy improved, only the very wealthiest Coloradans enjoyed substantial income gains while the vast majority of Colorado workers and their families — those who fuel economic growth across the state — saw little, if any, gains.”

The Colorado Center on Law & Policy, an economic security issues-focused nonprofit, found in its 2014 report “The State of Working Colorado,” that trend in income disparity has continued and that working families have seen little, if any, income growth over recent decades.

“Colorado’s economy has become something of a paradox: More people are working and, in that sense, the economy appears to be recovering from the recession,” Levy writes in the report. “But more working families are struggling to make ends meet as wages have failed to keep pace with increases in production and inflation.”

The New York Times also reported that since the late 1960s, more than half of U.S. households were in the middle income levels and were earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000. Until 2000, changes in the size were attributed to people moving up the income brackets, but since then, the American middle class has continued to shrink to now 43 percent of U.S. households — as more people fall off the bottom.

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com