Newsquest

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.

It has 205 brands across the UK, publishing online and in print (165 newspaper brands and 40 magazine brands) and 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 consumer and business-to-business (B2B) titles such as Insurance Times and The Strad.

Newsquest was founded in 1995 when United States private equity partnership KKR 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, Greater Manchester 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 £305 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 North West England, and three Review Group titles in Hertfordshire.

In 1999, Gannett'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".

In 2001, Newsquest bought Surrey and Sussex Publishing and Horley Publishing, publishers of Gatwick Life and Horley Life and the Dimbleby Newspaper Group's nine Greater London weeklies, including the Richmond & Twickenham Times for a reported £8 million.

In 2003, Gannett UK paid £216 million for the Scottish Media Group's three newspapers – Glasgow's Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times – 11 specialist consumer and business-to-business magazines and an online advertising and content business. The Competition Commission again inquired into this purchase, but later cleared it.