ity AM is set to announce a sale today to an unnamed UK-based group, with new buyers coming in just in time to fend off administration for the London freesheet, managing director Lawson Muncaster confirmed to the Standard today.
According to Sky News, the new buyer could be ecommerce business THG, whose founder Matthew Moulding has been openly critical of press coverage of his business in the past.
Reports emerged last night that the newspaper – distributed across the City and Canary Wharf, as well as major transport hubs – was preparing to appoint BDO as administrator, weeks after putting itself up for sale.
But managing director and co-founder Lawson Muncaster told the Standard that a buyer was found in time to prevent administration. The new group is UK-based and not a direct part of the media sector, but does already have some involvement in the space.
“They’re rich, they’re British, they’ve young and they’ve very clever,” he said.
He did confirm, though, that the group had been close to calling in an insolvency specialist before the purchase.
The free newspaper was founded in 2005 and its daily circulation was 67,714 copies as of January 2023. That makes it the ninth-most-circulated newspaper in the country.
When the sale was announced, Douglas McCabe, CEO and director of publishing and tech at Enders Analysis, told the Standard that the economics for City A.M. as a free print publication were “challenging”, and so a buyer would need a plan to elevate its online offering.
“Commuters — particularly commuters into the City — have remained stubbornly low post-pandemic, and the impressive corporate advertising that City A.M. carved out for itself in the late 2000s and early 2010s has also declined,” he said. “The unit costs of printing and distribution exploded in 2021 and 2022, and have not returned to pre-Ukraine levels.
“Any buyer would need a belief and vision for the brand as an online use-case. “