New Media Ventures Buys Texas Firm Latest Acquisition Publishes TV Magazines For Newspapers

New Media Ventures Inc. of Spokane has acquired a Houston-based company that publishes weekly TV magazines for newspapers in 29 states.

New Media, a unit of Cowles Publishing Co., said it has purchased the assets of Print Marketing Concepts, a limited partnership that employs 70 people in Houston, Boca Raton, Fla., and New York City.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

PMC’s TV magazines are distributed weekly by more than 100 newspapers, with combined readership of 13 million.

The Spokesman-Review, which is owned by Cowles, each Sunday distributes 140,000 copies of TV Week, a PMC publication.

Charles Dye, PMC’s managing partner in Houston, was named president and chief operating officer. Shaun O’L. Higgins, New Media president, was named chairman and chief executive officer of PMC.

“In acquiring PMC’s assets, we plan to build on its core competencies not only in selling space and producing TV supplements, but also in organizing sales campaigns for a broad range of specialized newspaper products,” Higgins said. “We also see synergies among PMC, our existing companies and our interactive TV licenses.”

Cowles formed New Media in 1993 to develop services for alternative postal delivery, audio text, book publishing, target-audience publications and other ventures.

New Media in 1994 acquired licenses to operate interactive video data services for Spokane and Boise, and purchased the Spokane Journal of Business.

PMC is New Media’s first venture outside the Pacific Northwest, and the first with a national distribution.

, DataTimes