• The Boston Globe, Tuesday, August 1, 2006 12 PM

A company that recently paid $410 million for a stable of suburban newspapers around Boston is looking for more publications around the country while trying to pay down a huge debt created by the deal, the Boston Globe reports. GateHouse Media Inc.--which two weeks ago filed to go public--sees big potential in smaller papers. Of the 380 daily newspaper owners in the United States, more than 93 percent own fewer than 10 papers. And that means there are a lot of potential sellers. "We believe this fragmentation provides significant consolidation opportunities," the company says. But "they've been piling up debt in order to grow," says Lou Ureneck, director of Boston University's business and economics journalism program. "The danger from a public point of view is that the debt burden gets so high that the company begins to drastically reduce its expenditures on the coverage of news."

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