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Funded from its own cash resources and completed last week, the deal is for an undisclosed sum.
National World said that the acquisition complements its reach across the South Yorkshire, Derbyshire and North Nottinghamshire markets.
Listed on the London Stock Exchange, National World plc became operational with the acquisition of JPIMedia (formerly Johnston Press) for £10.2m in 2021. Titles include The Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, and locally, The Sheffield Star.
With offices in Rotherham town centre, Regional Media Ltd was the most recent publisher of The Rotherham Advertiser.
The acquisition was announced alongside National World’s purchase of B2B media company, Insider Media Limited, making five acquisitions since December 2022 which the company says “will more than compensate for the recent downturn in advertising sales that has impacted the whole sector.”
David Montgomery, chairman of National World, said: “Over the last 12 months we have made a number of targeted investments and acquisitions designed to accelerate our progress, increase our capabilities and grow the audience for our high-quality content.
“National World offers a unique combination of digital news, specialist content and targeted audience engagement, helping it build deeper relationships with its readers and users.Today’s acquisitions are in line with that strategy as we reposition the business towards our new operating model.”
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National World’s strategy is to create a new publishing business model that enables it to “localise, energise, digitise and monetise” relevant and unique content.
As National World explains in its most recent annual report: “The publishing sector, not just in local news, has been slow to seek radical changes in the face of structural change in the media, preferring for decades to mainly trim costs. For local commercial publishers, in particular, there is a growing imbalance with the national publishers and broadcasters, who maintain some resilience through scale, while the local segment has long lost its one great advantage of classified advertising.
It also added that: “Instead of a digital first company, National World is taking the leap to being a digital only company. Newspapers will be produced on that basis rather than being the products of multiple industrial processes that should have been abandoned years ago. Ironically the printed newspaper products will achieve greater quality and relevance, in part mirroring characteristics of social media but strictly curated.”
And relevant to the Advertiser acquisition, it added: “True to our publishing heritage we will make our small weekly papers exclusively local in all content – banishing the generic content that was a feature of previous and counterproductive cost reduction measures.
“When acquiring heritage assets, with recent examples of Newry Reporter and Banbridge Chronicle acquired in Northern Ireland in early 2023, these are judged on market position and valuations reflecting the state of the newspaper sector. There is still a case for bolting on brands with a loyal audience that benefit from synergies as they are integrated in our infrastructure.”
The original Garnett Dickinson business started in 1858 in the back of a busy stationary shop where it first published the South Yorkshire Advertiser. The Rotherham Advertiser has been published by Regional Media Ltd, a company which acquired the publishing business and assets from Garnett Dickinson in 2015.
Garnett Dickinson, which had a state of the art print facility in Manvers, went into administration in 2017 following problems in an investment in a new press. It was sold in a pre-pack deal to GD Web Offset Limited, a vehicle incorporated for the purposes of the acquisition.
Images: Regional Media Ltd
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