Note from Zack: The Gazette to be family-owned

Dear Gazette readers and subscribers,

Yesterday, we announced our company is being purchased by Adams MultiMedia, a family-held company based in Minnesota.

The deal is expected to close on December 1, at which time many of our employees will become employees of our new owner.

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This is an important development, but we wanted to help put some context around what it means and why it’s happening.

Being a singularly held local news property was increasingly challenging.

Being a stand-alone media group means we spend a considerable number of resources doing things that aren’t directly related to producing a daily news report. Joining another news organization allows us to share some resources across other media platforms and we need to centralize some of the non-news operations in ways that allow us to keep as many resources reporting news as we can.

The current media landscape also requires near constant innovation and collaboration, things that can be hard to do if not matched with colleagues in the industry.

While we’ve worked tremendously hard in this space, there are limits within our existing organization to doing this work. We’ve also spent a lot of time collaborating with other media companies to participate in regional and national efforts to explore new ways to support local journalism, including philanthropy, government legislation and launching new revenue streams.

Adams is active in many of these same spaces. While change can be difficult, this should also be viewed positively for our region. We are joining a family-owned organization that believes strongly in local news.

The Gazette was under family ownership for the majority of its 143-year history. The upcoming change in ownership doesn’t require you to take any immediate action.

Subscriptions will continue and we will continue to print a newspaper three days per week and produce daily digital editions.

On behalf of Zack, Kelly, and the entire Gazette team, we appreciate your readership and know that our reporting team remains committed to covering Iowa. We will give updates as we move forward.

Thanks for reading,

Kelly Homewood, President

Zack Kucharski, Executive Editor