The owner of the Chicago Sun-Times is negotiating to purchase the Chicago Reader for about $3 million, according to Crain's Chicago Business, and the deal could be finalized next week.
Sun-Times parent company Wrapports LLC, which took over the daily in December, is looking to buy the alternative weekly from New York investment firm Atalaya Capital Management L.P., which acquired it along with four other weeklies out of bankruptcy in 2009 after lending money to prior owners at Tampa, Fla.-based Creative Loafing Inc.
"The Reader will survive and thrive because it represents what so many other media outlets have forgotten today and thus have threatened their very existence; that is, it's all about local, local, local!" said Brad Bulkley, the investment banker hired by Atalaya to sell the Creative Loafing papers.
Bringing the Reader into the Sun-Times newspaper group -- which includes seven suburban dailies and dozens of suburban weeklies -- could expand the chain's scant coverage of the city's arts, culture, restaurant and entertainment scene and connect it with a new category of advertisers.
