Johnston Press

Last updated

Johnston Press plc
Company type Private company
LSE:  JPR
Industry Newspapers
Founded1767;257 years ago (1767)
Defunct2018;6 years ago (2018)
FateEntered Administration. Assets acquired by JPIMedia
Successor JPIMedia
Headquarters Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Key people
David King (CEO)
Revenue £245.1 million (2015) [1]
£1.0 million (2015) [1]
£11.4 million (2015) [1]
Parent JPIMedia
WebsiteSee JPIMedia's website

Johnston Press plc was a multimedia company founded in Falkirk, Scotland, in 1767. [2] [3] Its flagship titles included UK-national newspaper the i , The Scotsman , the Yorkshire Post , the Falkirk Herald , and Belfast's The News Letter . The company was operating around 200 newspapers and associated websites around the United Kingdom and the Isle of Man when it went into administration and was then purchased by JPIMedia in 2018. [4]

Contents

The Falkirk Herald was the company's first acquisition in 1846. Johnston Press's assets were transferred to JPIMedia in 2018, who continued to publish its titles. [3]

Johnston Press announced it would place itself in administration on 16 November 2018 after it was unable to find a suitable buyer of the business to refinance £220m of debt. [5] It was delisted from the London Stock Exchange on 19 November 2018. [6] Johnston Press and its assets were brought under the control of JPIMedia on 17 November 2018 after a pre-packaged deal was agreed with creditors. [7] [3]

History

The first edition of the Falkirk Herald (1845), Johnston's first acquisition in 1846 FirstFalkirkHerald.jpg
The first edition of the Falkirk Herald (1845), Johnston's first acquisition in 1846
Johnston acquired one of Scotland's national titles, The Scotsman, in 2006 ScotsmanSign.jpg
Johnston acquired one of Scotland's national titles, The Scotsman , in 2006

The Johnston family business was involved in printing from 1797, originally in Falkirk. [8] It bought control of its first newspaper, the Falkirk Herald , in 1846. The company would remain headquartered in Falkirk for the next 150 years. The family publishing company was renamed F Johnston & Co Ltd in 1882, a title it would retain until it was floated on the London Stock Exchange as Johnston Press (LSE :  JPR) in 1988. [2]

The company's first major acquisition came in 1970, when it took control of the Fife-based publishers Strachan & Livingston. [2] In 1978, it bought Wilfred Edmunds Ltd in Chesterfield, publisher of the Derbyshire Times and The Yorkshire Weekly Newspaper Group in Wakefield. [2] The company bought The West Sussex County Times in 1988, The Halifax Evening Courier in 1994 and the newspaper interests of EMAP plc in 1996. [2] Further expansion followed with Portsmouth & Sunderland Newspapers in 1999 and Regional Independent Media Holdings in 2002. [2]

The company expanded into the Irish market in 2005 by purchasing Local Press Ltd, a company owned by 3i (£65 million), [9] the newspaper assets of Scottish Radio Holdings, known as Score Press with forty-five titles in Scotland and Ireland (£155 million), [10] and the Leinster Leader Group (€138.6 million). [11]

Johnston Press acquired The Scotsman Publications in 2006, taking ownership of two of Scotland's major national broadsheet titles, The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday , as well as two local papers, the Edinburgh Evening News and the Edinburgh Herald & Post . [12]

In 2014, Iconic Newspapers acquired Johnston Press' titles in the Republic of Ireland. [13] In March of that year, Johnston Press launched a digital advertising agency called 1XL, in partnership with a number of other media companies including Local World and Newsquest . [14]

In February 2016, the company announced it was buying i newspaper for £24m. [15] The deal to buy i was completed on 10 April 2016, giving Johnston Press a daily print circulation of over 600,000 newspapers and an audience online and in print of almost 32 million people. [16]

In July 2016 Johnston Press sold off its three titles on the Isle of Man — the Isle of Man Examiner , the Isle of Man Courier and the Manx Independent — to Tindle Newspapers in a deal worth £4.25m. [17] In January 2017 Johnston sold off a further 13 titles covering the East Midlands and East Anglia (including the Stamford Mercury ) to Iliffe Media for £17m. The same month, the company also won a contract from Associated Newspapers (ANL) to print the Monday-to-Saturday issues of the Daily Mail newspaper at Johnston's Portsmouth Web facility in Hampshire, following the closure of ANL's printing site at Didcot. [18]

Administration

In October 2018, with debts of around £200m and a market capitalisation of £3m, the company announced that it had put itself up for sale. [19] On 16 November 2018, the group announced it was filing for administration, intending to then sell the assets to its lenders. [20] Johnson Press in a statement added there was no longer any value in its shares, in a major blow to Christen Ager-Hanssen, the chief executive of Custos Group, which was the largest shareholder at 25 percent. The company agreed a pre-packaged administration whereby Johnston Press's businesses and assets would be sold to a group of companies controlled by its creditors. Those included GoldenTree Asset Management, the largest creditor with about £70m of bonds. [7] [21]

Takeover by creditors

On 17 November 2018, a spokesperson for Johnston Press announced that all its titles had been transferred to the control of JPIMedia, a special purpose vehicle (SPV), owned by the creditors. Under the terms of the pre-packaged deal, ownership passed to a consortium of four lenders, CarVal, Fidelity, Benefit Street Partners and Goldentree Asset Management – who reduced its debts to £85 million and injected £35 million investment. [3] This however was subject to criticism by Johnston Press's largest shareholder, described as a "blatant pre-planned corporate theft by bondholders", and was raised in Parliament. [22]

Operations

Newspapers in Great Britain

The following is a partial list of British newspapers once owned by the company:

Newspapers in Ireland

JPIMedia publishes a total of 22 titles in Northern Ireland through two holding companies, JPIMedia NI and Derry Journal Newspapers. The geographic readership of some titles extends across the Irish border into the Republic of Ireland, such as the Derry Journal which also covers County Donegal. Former JPIMedia titles published in the Republic of Ireland now belong to Iconic Newspapers. [13]

Related Research Articles

<i>The Scotsman</i> British national daily newspaper

The Scotsman is a Scottish compact newspaper and daily news website headquartered in Edinburgh. First established as a radical political paper in 1817, it began daily publication in 1855 and remained a broadsheet until August 2004. Its parent company, National World, also publishes the Edinburgh Evening News. It had an audited print circulation of 8,762 for July to December 2022. Its website, Scotsman.com, had an average of 138,000 unique visitors a day as of 2017. The title celebrated its bicentenary on 25 January 2017.

Newsquest Media Group Limited is the second largest publisher of regional and local newspapers in the United Kingdom. It is owned by the American mass media holding company Gannett.

Scotland on Sunday is a Scottish Sunday newspaper, published in Edinburgh by National World and consequently assuming the role of Sunday sister to its daily stablemate The Scotsman. It was originally printed in broadsheet format but in 2013 was relaunched as a tabloid. Since this latest relaunch it comprises three parts, the newspaper itself which includes the original "Insight" section, a sports section and Spectrum magazine which incorporates At Home, originally a separate magazine.

<i>Edinburgh Evening News</i> Daily newspaper located in Edinburgh, Scotland

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The Falkirk Herald is a weekly newspaper and daily news website published by National World. It provides reportage, opinion and analysis of news, current affairs and sport in the towns of Falkirk, Camelon, Grangemouth, Larbert, Stenhousemuir and Denny as well as the neighbouring villages of Polmont, Redding, Brightons, Banknock and Bonnybridge. Its circulation area has a total population of 151,600, the fifth largest urban area in Scotland. It was named Weekly Newspaper of the Year at the 2013 Scottish Press Awards.

John McGlynn is a Scottish football coach and former player who manages Scottish Championship club Falkirk. He has previously managed Scottish clubs Raith Rovers, Heart of Midlothian and Livingston.

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<i>i</i> (newspaper) British daily newspaper

The i is a British national newspaper published in London by Daily Mail and General Trust and distributed across the United Kingdom. It is aimed at "readers and lapsed readers" of all ages and commuters with limited time, and was originally launched in 2010 as a sister paper to The Independent. It was later acquired by Johnston Press in 2016 after The Independent shifted to a digital-only model. The i came under the control of JPIMedia a day after Johnston Press filed for administration on 16 November 2018. The paper and its website were bought by the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) on 29 November 2019, for £49.6 million. On 6 December 2019 the Competition and Markets Authority served an initial enforcement order on DMGT and DMG Media Limited, requiring the paper to be run separately pending investigation.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "Preliminary Results 2015" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 June 2016. Retrieved 14 April 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "History of Johnston Press". Johnston Press plc. Archived from the original on 17 November 2018. Retrieved 10 August 2007.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Doward, Jamie (17 November 2018). "Johnston Press: rescue plan for Scotsman newspaper group". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 November 2018.
  4. ↑ Sweney, Mark (16 November 2018). "Owner of the Scotsman and i newspapers enters administration". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077. Archived from the original on 10 December 2018. Retrieved 14 December 2018.
  5. ↑ "Administration for i and Scotsman owner Johnston Press". Sky News. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
  6. ↑ Dean, James. "Johnston Press collapses into administration". The Times . ISSN   0140-0460 . Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  7. 1 2 Garrahan, Matthew; Wells, Peter. "Troubled Johnston Press agrees administration deal with lenders" . The Financial Times. Archived from the original on 11 December 2022. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
  8. ↑ "Archives, The Scottish Printing Archival Trust" . Retrieved 22 March 2017.
  9. ↑ Newspaper Society Database of Mergers [ dead link ] (login required)
  10. ↑ West, Karl (22 June 2005). "Johnston Press picks up SRH local newspaper division". The Herald (Glasgow) . Retrieved 11 September 2014.
  11. ↑ Press Release on Purchase of Leinster Leader Group Archived 8 August 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ↑ Tryhorn, Chris (19 December 2005). "Johnston Press buys Scotsman". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 September 2014.
  13. 1 2 "Johnston Press sells its 14 titles in the Republic". Irish Times. Archived from the original on 9 April 2014. Retrieved 22 August 2014.
  14. ↑ "Johnston Press, Local World and Newsquest unite for 1XL digital sell" . Retrieved 14 April 2016.
  15. ↑ "Johnston Press to buy i newspaper for £24m". BBC. 12 February 2016. Retrieved 14 April 2016.
  16. ↑ "Financial Results 2015". Archived from the original on 22 October 2016. Retrieved 14 April 2016.
  17. ↑ Mayhew, Freddy (4 July 2016). "Tindle Newspapers buys three Isle of Man titles from Johnston Press in deal worth £4.25m". Press Gazette .
  18. ↑ Turvill, William (25 January 2017). "Multi-million pound Daily Mail printing contract win provides some relief to newspaper group Johnston Press". City A.M. Retrieved 27 January 2017.
  19. ↑ Sweney, Mark (11 October 2018). "Johnston Press puts itself up for sale". The Guardian.
  20. ↑ "Johnston Press announces intention to file for administration". BBC News. 17 November 2018.
  21. ↑ Doward, Jamie (17 November 2018). "Johnston Press announces irescue plan". The Guardian.
  22. ↑ "Johnston Press buyout debated in the Commons - News from Parliament". UK Parliament. 19 November 2018. Retrieved 19 November 2018.
  23. ↑ Our Business: Johnston (Falkirk) Ltd, Johnston Press plc Archived 17 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  24. ↑ "Paisley and Renfrewshire Extra". 15 April 2011.
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