JOHNSTON Press, Britain's fourth largest publisher of regional newspapers, has acquired Tweeddale Press, which controls three weekly newspapers in the Borders.
Tweeddale, based in Berwick-on-Tweed, owns the Southern Reporter, Berwickshire News and Berwick Advertiser. Together, these three paid-for weeklies have a circulation of over 30,000.
Terms of the deal were not
disclosed, but Johnston is believed to have paid between #5m and #10m for the family-owned company.
The Berwick Advertiser was founded by the Smail family in 1808 and had been controlled by it for eight generations.
Outgoing chairman Derek Smail and his brother John, who edits the Southern Reporter, will both leave Tweeddale once the deal is completed next month.
However, they will retain an interest in newspapers through a separate company, Commonwealth Publishing. It has two newspapers that circulate among New Zealand and South African expatriates in Britain and has a large stake in the Daily News, an independent newspaper in Zimbabwe. Derek Smail said he and his family had decided to sell Tweeddale because it was a small company that could no longer compete when it came to investing in the titles.
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