Exchange & Mart

Newsquest Media Group Ltd.

Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Media
Founded	1995
Headquarters	London, England, United Kingdom
Key people	Henry Faure Walker (CEO)
Products	Newspapers
Number of employees	5,000
Parent	Gannett Company
Website	newsquest.co.uk

Newsquest Media Group Ltd. is the second largest publisher of regional and local newspapers in the United Kingdom with 205 brands across the UK, publishing online and in print (165 newspaper brands and 40 magazine brands). It reaches 28 million visitors a month online and 6.5 million readers a week in print. Based in London, Newsquest employs a total of more than 5,500 people across the UK. It also has a specialist arm that publishes both commercial and business-to-business (B2B) titles such as Insurance Times, The Strad, and Boxing News.

Newsquest was founded in 1995 when US private equity partnership Kohlberg Kravis Roberts financed a £210 million management buy-out of the Reed Regional Newspapers group of British papers from Reed Elsevier.

In 1996 Newsquest swapped its Yorkshire titles for Johnston Press’s Bury, Lancashire area titles and £9.25 million, sold some of its titles in the English Midlands to Midland Independent Newspapers and bought the Westminster Press local newspapers group for £12.3 million from Pearson, owner of Penguin Books and the Financial Times, resulting in Newsquest doubling in size. The next year it floated on the London Stock Exchange realising a market capitalisation of £500 million. In 1998, Newsquest added the Sussex-based Contact-a-Car, the London Property Weekly titles, two titles in the North West of England, and three Review Group titles in Hertfordshire.

In 1999, The US Gannett media group's newly formed UK subsidiary paid £922 million (about US $1.5 billion) for Newsquest and took on the company’s debt. In 2000, Gannett paid £525 million for Southampton-based News Communications and Media’s South Coast dailies and weeklies – and its Southernprint magazine printing division – to add to Newsquest’s portfolio. It also picked up the regional newspapers business – outside Manchester – of the Guardian Media Group, a takeover that the Competition Commission cleared as there was 'no overlap, in the companies' circulation areas.