The paper chase
By EDITOR Joel Dreyfuss REPORTER Michael Rogers

(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Des Moines Register and Tribune Co. agreed to sell four newspapers, including the Des Moines Register, one of the nation's most respected dailies, for $200 million to Gannett Co., the U.S.'s most acquisitive newspaper chain. The sale, if approved by the Register's stockholders, would end a bidding war for the paper that began in November when two Register executives and several other investors, including Dow Jones & Co., offered $112 million for the company. The Register rejected that bid and several others before orchestrating a bidding process that paved the way for Gannett to increase its lead as the largest newspaper chain, with 85 daily newspapers, over No. 2 Knight-Ridder, with 29. The sale of the Register continues a sweeping consolidation of the newspaper industry that began about ten years ago. Of some 1,700 daily newspapers in the nation, only 530 are owned by individuals or small newspaper chains, according to statistics compiled by Lynch Jones & Ryan, a New York- based stock brokerage firm. In 1976 there were 1,762 newspapers, 725 of them independently owned. Some of the remaining family-owned papers that analysts say would make prize catches for a newspaper chain: the Louisville Courier- Journal and Louisville Times, the Salt Lake City Tribune, and the Little Rock, Arkansas, Gazette. ''There are some left, but whether they're going to be available is another question,'' said John Morton, a newspaper analyst with Lynch Jones. Morton expects that prices for the papers will likely go up as a result of the Register deal, which analysts considered expensive. ''If it had been in the Sunbelt, no one would have batted an eye, but when you pay that price for a paper in the Dust Bowl, it puts upward pressure on prices for newspapers everywhere.''