6 newspapers serving Sacramento-area suburbs sold to new owners. Who bought them?

A group of local newspapers serving suburban Sacramento and Placer counties is under new ownership, sold this week to Canadian owners in a deal involving 11 total California news outlets.

The Auburn Journal, Folsom Telegraph, Lincoln News Messenger, Loomis News, Placer Herald and Roseville Press-Tribune — a group of publications known collectively as Gold Country Media — were sold by San Diego-based Brehm Communications Inc. to a company called Gold Mountain California News Media Inc.

The sale was announced in a story posted Thursday morning to the websites of all six Gold Country Media newspapers.

The terms of the deal, which included the six Gold Country newspapers as well as five community newspapers in Southern California, were not disclosed.

The Auburn Journal is printed twice weekly; the remaining five Gold Country newspapers are weeklies.

Gold Mountain Media is a subsidiary of the Vancouver-based Alta Newspaper Group.

Alta Newspaper Group and its subsidiaries in recent years have purchased several other Northern California newspapers, according to Thursday’s story by Gold Country Media. These include the Marysville Appeal-Democrat, sold in 2013; the Lodi News-Sentinel, in 2015; and The Union, which serves Grass Valley and Nevada County, earlier this year.

The group owns numerous other newspapers across Southern California and the Central Valley, including the Bakersfield Californian, the Hanford Sentinel, the Sonora Union Democrat and the Antelope Valley Press, most of them acquired over the past decade, media reports show.

“Our plans are to continue with the well-established fine tradition which the family has been recognized for in their long and continuous history in the newspaper industry,” publisher Steven Malkowich, an Alta Newspaper Group executive, said in a statement included in the Gold Country Media story announcing the sale.

The five Southern California newspapers purchased in the latest deal were the Big Bear Grizzly, (Lake Arrowhead) Mountain News, the Hi-Desert Star, the Desert Trail and Desert Mobile Home News. All had been owned by Brehm Communications’ Hi-Desert Publishing prior to the sale.

“This transaction is bittersweet as our family has been in the newspaper business for over 102 years, however we felt it was time to pass these amazing publications and employees to a new home,” Brehm Communications CEO Ryan Schuyler said in a statement to Gold Country Media.