NY Daily News No Longer for Sale

Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman has called off the sale of the nearly 100-year-old New York newspaper. “For a variety of reasons, I have decided to withdraw the Daily News from the market,” Zuckerman wrote in a memo to staffers. (FishbowlNY)

Zuckerman, 78, announced on Thursday that after six months of trying to wring a single respectable bid for the money- and circulation-losing paper out of the local business community—and failing—he would take the paper off the block. (New York Post)

Presumably, the Daily News was not going to fetch the reported $150 to $200 million Zuckerman was said to be asking for the paper, which is believed to lose between $20 million and $30 million annually, and its printing presses in Jersey City. (Politico Media)

The nearly century-old New York tabloid is the eighth-largest circulating U.S. newspaper. The paper had hired investment bank Lazard Ltd. to advise on the deal, opening a rocky six-month bidding process that elicited scant interest. Bidders included supermarket baron John Catsimatidis and James Finkelstein, publisher of The Hill in Washington, D.C. and a former part-owner of The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek and Billboard magazine. People close to Zuckerman have said he wasn’t satisfied with any offer. (WSJ)

The Daily News' circulation, once in the millions, averaged 307,078 on weekdays and Saturday and 433,077 on Sundays in the second quarter of 2015, according to data from Alliance for Audited Media. (NYT)

H/T: AdWeek