It’s where our family is from and where our company was founded,” Alex Taylor, president and CEO of Cox Enterprises, said in a news release. “Dayton, Ohio, is a big part of the Cox DNA. Cox’s purchase of what was then known as the Dayton Evening News in 1898. Cox Enterprises traces its roots to Dayton and founder James M. The agreement solves a problem triggered by a recent federal court decision that threatened the ability of the Daily News, Springfield News-Sun and (Butler County) Journal-News to publish as daily papers. Cox is going to buy those newspapers back:Ītlanta-based Cox Enterprises on Monday announced it has reached an agreement to buy three Ohio newspapers, including the Dayton Daily News, that it previously agreed to sell as part of a deal to sell the company’s television stations. Well, happy day, a solution has been found, in back-to-the-future fashion. If someone wants to use local TV bucks to support local newspaper reporting, I’m game.)īut whatever your opinion on the matter, it’s clear the intention was never to somehow use federal regulation to encourage newspapers to print less often.

And local TV, while facing plenty of challenges around audience loss and the switch to streaming, still makes a bunch of money. (I’m of the opinion that struggling local newspapers aren’t in any position to “dominate” the market for news in anything like they were decades ago. There are good arguments to be had about whether or not this sort of cross-ownership ban, passed in 1975, is still a good idea in 2020. The obvious solution: only print the Dayton “Daily” News three times a week! Federal rules defined “daily” as publishing at least four times a week. The FCC regulation only applied to daily newspapers.

What to do? Well, Apollo - with all the public-spiritedness and sense of civic responsibility you might expect from a private equity firm run by a guy who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein for years - figured out a way to get around the need for an exemption. But selling to Apollo meant that old special exemption disappeared. But the Dayton newspaper+TV combo has been around since 1949, so the feds grandfathered the arrangement in. Normally, a city’s newspaper isn’t allowed to have the same corporate owner as one of its local TV stations - a 45-year-old FCC regulation aimed at protecting media diversity within a given market. December 2, 2019In December, I wrote about the unusual case of the Dayton Daily News - a core part of the Cox newspaper chain for more than a century, but sold a year ago to Apollo Global Management, a private equity fund of the sort that seems to be the only entity buying newspapers these days.Īpollo bought the Daily News along with a few other Dayton-area media properties Cox owned - two county-seat papers just outside town, the local CBS affiliate, and some radio stations.

Dayton daily news