For 15 years, The Target Report has examined M&A activity across the printing, packaging and related graphic communications industries. Last July, I invited our first-ever guest author of The Target Report, Sara April, President of Dirks, Van Essen & April, to provide a closer look at the market for local newspapers, an industry that remains closely connected to the broader printing business.
That connection is particularly personal for Sara. She grew up with a sheetfed printing press in the basement of her family home, where her parents operated a small print shop. The tell-tale smell of ink and blanket wash meant home to her. After joining Dirks, Van Essen & April in 2006, she went on to spend the next 20 years working on newspaper transactions and touring pressrooms across the country, from the Boston Globe’s iconic facility on Morrissey Boulevard and the flexo press that ran in Atlantic City to a tiny basement pressroom in Minnesota with a dirt floor. Every newspaper had its own story, dedicated crew, and lore. One even had a gun safe filled with silver bars.
The newspaper industry has changed dramatically during that time. Print circulation and advertising revenue have declined, production has consolidated, and many local publishers have struggled with rising costs and limited scale. Those changes have directly affected newspapers’ ancillary commercial printing operations, helped drive the growth of regional printing hubs, and rippled upstream to paper manufacturers, while also reshaping who owns and operates local news organizations.
I asked Sara to return as a guest author of The Target Report this July to provide an update on newspaper transactions and, more importantly, to step back from the individual deals and consider what the activity says about the changing nature of newspaper ownership. As she explains below, one of the most striking features of today’s market is not simply that newspapers continue to change hands, but the remarkably varied group of people and organizations that still want to own them.
– Mark
The Buyers Are the Story
By Sara April, Guest Author
For years, consolidation was one of the easiest ways to describe newspaper M&A. A relatively small group of well-capitalized newspaper companies acquired independent publishers, assembled regional clusters, consolidated production and administrative functions, and built scale.
That is still happening. But after looking at the transactions we have completed and tracked over the past year, what strikes me is how incomplete that description has become. So far in 2026, we have tracked 42 separate transactions involving more than 120 titles and 36 different buyers. In 2025, 172 titles changed hands in 62 transactions involving 52 buyers. The number that interests me most is not the number of newspapers sold. It is the number of buyers.
Of the 36 buyers in our 2026 transaction log, only four have completed more than one acquisition. Nelson Media Company and CherryRoad Media each have completed three, while Forum Communications Company and Times Media Group have completed two. The remaining 32 buyers appear only once.
Read the rest of this article on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
