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New Jersey Daily Newspaper Acquisitions Timeline 1970-1998
1970 Richard Scudder & brother sold two family owned properties, Newark News and Garden State Paper Co. to Media General for about $35 million in stock
1966 Newhouse closed the Bayonne Times as a money-loser
purchased by NH
1972 Newark Evening News, founded in 1883, closes
1974 Washington Post Company acquires Trenton Times from the Kerney family, which had published it since 1904
1981 Washington Post Company sells Trenton Times to Allbritton Communications
1983 Dean Singleton makes first MediaNews acquisition, acquiring Gloucester County Times for $10 million
1985 Newhouse group purchases the Trenton Times from Allbritton
1985 Garden State Newspapers formed in partnership with Media General
1985 Malcolm Borg, Chairman of Macromedia, purchased the News Tribune of Woodbridge
1985 Journal Register Company (Ingersoll publication) purchases The Trentonian
1987 Ralph Ingersoll II paid $155 million (cash) for Morristown Daily Record from the Tomlinson family. Bought through a deal arranged by Michael Milken (Drexel Burnham), and the Ingersoll/Milken relationship has come under criticism
1987 Ingersoll sells the Morristown Daily Record to the Goodson Newspaper Group
1990 Garden State Newspapers forms "North Jersey Newspapers" a partnership with Goodson Newspapers. Singleton (GSN) contributed the daily papers of the Hudson Dispatch of Union City, the Daily Journal of Elizabeth and the New Jersey Herald and News of Passaic. Goodson contributed a dozen weeklies in affluent areas. The dailies foundered, (two closed), but the weeklies thrived. Singleton made a $6 million capital call on Goodson, and when they couldn't meet it, walked away with the weeklies
1990 Warburg, Pincus, then Ingersoll's partner and financier and later the Journal Register's majority shareholder, stepped in and essentially bought Ingersoll out of US newspaper market
1991 North Jersey Newspapers (Singleton/Media News) sold Hudson Dispatch of Union City to its rival the Jersey Journal. Closed April 1991.
1992 (Elizabeth) Daily Journal closed by North Jersey Newspapers
1993 NJP/Asbury Park Press purchases the Central New Jersey Home News (Brunswick) from Boyd family, (Publisher William Boyd's great-grandfather founded 1879)
1994 Media General Inc. sells its holdings in Garden State Newspapers to Singleton and Scudder. Papers owned by Garden State are managed on contract by MediaNews Group, a Houston based firm owned by the duo and operated by Singleton.
1995 NJP (owners of Asbury Park Press) purchases Woodbridge News Tribune and merges it with Central New Jersey Home News to form the Home News and Tribune
1997 Gannett purchases NJP (Asbury Park Press and Home News and Tribune)
1997 Macromedia, parent of the Record, purchases the North Jersey Herald and News and 11 weekly newspapers from New Jersey Newspapers Co, a subsidiary of Singleton's Media News Group
1998 Gannett purchases the Daily Record (Morristown) and the Ocean County Observer in Tom's River
Appendix 2 New Jersey Ownership--Daily Papers