• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, February 13, 2007

The auction of its main properties may be dragging, but the Tribune Co. has succeeded in selling one of its smaller newspapers. Hoy New York, a free Spanish-language daily with circulation of about 56,000, has been bought by ImpreMedia LLC, Tribune announced Monday. Tribune Co. is holding onto Hoy's Los Angeles and Chicago operations.

Explaining the move, Scott Smith, president of Tribune Publishing, said: "Although Hoy New York made good progress over the last year, we did not see a path to profitability in this market."

For its part, ImpreMedia sounded confident, noting that Hoy fits well with its other publications, including El Diario La Prensa--the oldest Spanish-language newspaper in the U.S.

"The addition of Hoy New York to the ImpreMedia national sales network will significantly increase our penetration of the New York Hispanic market," said Erich Linker, senior vice president of sales for ImpreMedia. "It will expand our overall national reach and make our sales proposition even more compelling." Together, the two papers should give ImpreMedia daily circulation of over 100,000.

Currently, Hoy New York shares production and distribution infrastructure with Newsday, a tabloid-style daily based in Long Island also owned by Tribune. With some of Newsday's management in charge of Hoy's business operations, the latter became involved in a lengthy, damaging circulation scandal beginning five years ago.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, from 2002-2004, Newsday employees conspired with newspaper distributors to inflate the paid circulations of that paper and Hoy by up to 100,000 copies a week. As part of this scheme, employees dropped 30,000 papers on weekdays and 50,000 on Sundays at retail locations--all of which were counted as sold. But "paid circulation relating to the retail locations never exceeded 7,000 newspapers per weekday, or 10,000 newspapers on Sunday," the DOJ statement concluded.