Sample News Group Announces Agreement to Acquire Brunswick (ME) Times RecordBack to News

BRUNSWICK, ME, DECEMBER 19, 2007 – The Times Record, a newspaper with a daily circulation of 11,500, is being sold to Sample News Group, publisher of the Journal Tribune in Biddeford, six weeklies in southern Maine and a string of daily newspapers in Pennsylvania. The sale is expected to close in late February. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, a newspaper merger-and-acquisition firm based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, advised The Brunswick Publishing Company in the transaction.

The announcement was made Wednesday by Douglas Niven, Times Record publisher and member of the family that has owned The Brunswick Publishing Co. newspaper for more than a century, and Chris Miles, a partner in Sample News Group.

"We’ve been committed over the past four generations to reporting the news of the communities that we serve," Niven said. "We are confident that the new owner shares the same philosophy and may, in fact, do it better than we have been able to do. Their increased resources are bound to strengthen the newspaper."

Miles noted that he and business partner Scoop Sample share family roots in the industry that go back more than 60 years.

"Both of us have long histories in the newspaper business," Miles said. "Both of our family newspapers, where we started in Pennsylvania, are still in our families and remain an integral part of our group of newspapers."

The Times Record covers news in Brunswick, Bath and 17 other communities in Maine’s midcoast region from Freeport to Wiscasset.

Niven said he will remain on the newspaper’s board of directors after the sale and looks forward to working with the new owners. Miles, who recently moved to Maine, will assume day-to-day operations of the business.

Niven said his family placed a high priority on selling to another family-owned newspaper operation "that is as committed as we are to local journalism and the newspaper business. This is one family to another family."