AURORA | The Aurora Sentinel — daily, weekly and online news and advertising source to the state’s third-largest city — was sold to the Aurora Media Group LLC Thursday for an undisclosed amount.
The Sentinel, its publications, digital products and The Buckley Guardian came under control of new owners Feb. 24, according to officials from AMG and the now-former owners Aurora Publishing Co.
New publisher James Gold will direct operations of The Sentinel newspapers and associated media products.
“Professionally and personally, we are thrilled to be part of a community as culturally rich, innovative and thriving as Aurora,” Gold said. “The Sentinel and Buckley Guardian will continue their historical commitment to serving the community with exceptional journalism that instills a sense of place and perspective. In the months ahead we will extend our print and digital media, to engage the city’s political, business, educational, cultural and artistic communities in new and compelling ways.”
Gold is the managing partner for Leap Media Partners and was SVP/CMO of the New York Times Regional Media Group.
Editor Dave Perry will remain. Former publisher H. Harrison Cochran is retiring.
“We were pleased in 1991 to bring Aurora’s paper back to local ownership and are excited that the Aurora Media Group will continue that,” Cochran said. “Local ownership with hands-on management is increasingly rare in the era of corporate consolidation.”
The 102-year-old newspaper has covered Aurora as a weekly, a daily and as a digital media company while the city grew from a rural hamlet east of Denver to become an exurb of 325,078 people, Buckley Air Force Base and the massive Fitzsimons medical and research complex.
The newspaper has changed hands and names under a variety of private and corporate owners over the decades. Once part of the Sentinel news group under the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the paper was sold to local owners at the Aurora Publishing Co. in 1991 and remained under that banner until now.
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