Sale of Honolulu Advertiser to be completed Monday; newspaper merger expected in 1 or 2 months

Hawaii readers to see new newspaper in month or 2

HONOLULU — The pending merger of Hawaii’s two largest newspapers is estimated to take 30 to 60 days, and the clock begins ticking Monday when the owner of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin is set to conclude the purchase of The Honolulu Advertiser from Gannett Co.

The newspapers will publish separately during the transition until Star-Bulletin owner David Black’s Oahu Publications Inc. launches the combined newspaper to be called the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, said Dennis Francis, publisher of the Star-Bulletin and president of Oahu Publications.

In the meantime, employees of the papers will continue to work at their separate facilities. The Star-Advertiser is to be located at that larger Star-Bulletin headquarters, located at Waterfront Plaza in downtown Honolulu.

Francis said job offers and layoffs will occur once Oahu Publications determines staffing needs. The Star-Bulletin has about 300 employees, including 75 in the newsroom. The Advertiser has 600 employees, including about 130 journalists.

“While the Star-Advertiser’s newsroom won’t likely be the size of the current Advertiser newsroom, it will be the largest news gathering staff in the state of Hawaii by a long shot,” Francis said.

Star-Bulletin and Advertiser subscribers will continue receiving their newspapers and then transition to the Star-Advertiser.

“Our full expectation is to be a healthy, profitable newspaper for many years to come,” Francis said.

He estimated the Star-Advertiser’s paid circulation would be 135,000 to 140,000 daily and 155,000 to 165,000 Sunday, up from the Advertiser’s official audit for the sixth-month period ended March 31, which recorded an average daily circulation of 110,000 and a Sunday circulation of 123,000.

The merging of the Advertiser, founded in 1856, and the Star-Bulletin, established in 1882, comes after the U.S. Justice Department closed an investigation by its antitrust division.

Officials determined the purchase was “unlikely to substantially reduce competition because the division determined that the Star-Bulletin satisfied the failing firm test,” said Gina Talamona, a division spokeswoman.

The Star-Bulletin has lost about $100 million in the past nine years and has been supported financially by the popular, ad-filled, free weekly newspaper MidWeek.

The division sought to determine “if anyone would buy the Star-Bulletin at a price equal to or greater than the liquidated value of the paper’s assets and provide adequate capital to assure its continued operation,” Talamona said.

The few bids that were submitted were well below the liquidated value, she said.