American City Business Journals acquires Streetwise Media, which had backing from TL Ventures

Tom Paine
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American City Business Journals (parent of the Philadelphia Business Journal and similar publications around the country) yesterday announced it had acquired Streetwise Media, publisher of online journals BostInno in Boston and InTheCapital in DC. The websites cover education, political and lifestyle, in addition to local business and technology news. Terms were not disclosed.

There are a couple of interesting angles to this. One is that ACBJ obviously has intentions to expand the Streetwise Media concept to at least some of the other markets its publishes in. Could Philly be one of them?

The other local connection is that Radnor-based TL Ventures last year led a $1.3 million seed round in Streetwise Media. Carolyn Harkins of TL Ventures, who is also CEO of Harkins Venture Advisors and Managing Director of Penn Mezzanine Partners, served on Streetwise's board.

ACBJ is a unit of Advance Publications, which also publishes many daily newspapers and owns the Conde Nast magazine group, in addition to cable tv and broadcasting interests. Advance Publications has cut back several of its dailies to three days per week print schedules in recent months.


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Harrisburg Patriot-News to go to three days per week print schedule; Are Advance Publications' NJ papers next?

Tom Paine

Advance Publications is expanding its transition to a three days per week print schedule for its newspaper properties. The new format, which Advance first initiated at a Michigan paper and then expanded to Alabama and New Orleans, is now being rolled out to Harrisburg and Syracuse.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News and Advance's online arm in Pennsylvania, PennLive.com, will form one organization, PA Media Group, and the company will change its print schedule to three days a week beginning in January 2013, the Patriot-News announced today. "At the same time, the organization will intensify its online and digital news-gathering efforts 24 hours a day, seven days a week", the Patriot-News says. A print edition will continue to be published on Sundays and the other two editions will be "on the scale of the current Sunday editions". Sunday circulation has fallen from 176,000 in 1992 to 118,000 today, and daily circulation has taken a similar plunge, according to the paper. A similar announcement was made today by the Syracuse Post-Standard.

No word yet from Advance's New Jersey group, which includes the Newark Star-Ledger, The Times of Trenton, and the NJ.com website, but it would not be surprising if they were the next to fall.

Obviously, with few exceptions the newspaper industry business model is still trying to find a bottom.

A personal note: as a child I delivered Advance Publications' flagship paper, the Staten Island Advance, and the Star-Ledger.



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