GateHouse Media Buys Newspapers From Schurz Communications

Schurz Communications announced Monday it will sell its publishing division, including the South Bend Tribune, to GateHouse Media.

According to The South Bend Tribune, terms of the sale, which is to be closed on Friday, have not yet been announced.

Schurz was founded in 1872 by brothers-in-law Alfred Miller and Elmer Crockett, a pair of Union veterans of the Civil War, who published the first edition of The Tribune on March 9 of that year. The newspaper has been owned and operated by descendants of those two families ever since.

The sale includes all 20 Schurz publications, including the Herald-Times in Bloomington, Ind., The Petoskey News-Review in Michigan, The American News in Aberdeen, S.D., and The Herald-Mail in Hagerstown, Md., as well as a group of smaller papers surrounding Bloomington.

The Pittsford, N.Y.-based GateHouse is one of the largest publishers of print and online media in the United States, operating 145 daily publications before the Schurz acquisition. As of Sept. 30, the company operated in more than 550 markets across 37 states. This week’s sale adds two more states, Indiana and South Dakota, to GateHouse’s footprint.

Schurz executives and board members agreed to the sale after deciding GateHouse would offer a scale of operations that can make the newspapers more competitive and successful long term. Employees were told of the sale Monday morning.

The sale brings to an end 147 years of local ownership of the South Bend Tribune, which is one of the city’s oldest continuously operating businesses.

Alfred Miller died in 1892, and his son, Fredrick A. Miller then became the Tribune’s editor. He continued as editor and publisher for 62 years, until his death in 1954. Under his leadership, the Tribune founded both WSBT Radio and WSBT-TV on the third floor of the Tribune Building. Upon F.A. Miller’s death, his nephew, Franklin Schurz Sr. became the Tribune’s editor and publisher.

Over the decades, Schurz Communications grew into a chain of more than a dozen small and mid-sized newspapers and also eventually owned a string of TV and radio stations across the country, including the WSBT stations.

The sale of its publishing division is another large step away from traditional media for Schurz Communications, which sold all of its TV and radio stations in 2015.

The company will now focus on the broadband companies it still owns, as well as cloud and managed IT services.