In his regular daily email today Stephen Main has told his subscribers he has sold the Crikey website to Eric Beecher.
He writes:
After almost five years of operation, yesterday afternoon Stephen Mayne and Paula Piccinini signed binding contracts for the $1 million sale of Crikey.
The buyers are Eric Beecher and Di Gribble from Private Media Partners (PMP), publisher of The Reader.
Eric and Di were the original founders of Text Media which was sold to Fairfax for more than $60 million in 2003-04.
The terms of the sale are that PMP pays a non-refundable deposit of $200,000 in installments through the course of 2005 and has complete management control of Crikey for 18 months from the effective date of March 1, 2005.
Then, in September 2006, PMP must either complete the purchase with the balance of $800,000 passing to us, or surrender their deposit and hand back management control.
Why sell?
The decision to hand over management control to some media professionals is based on the desire to take Crikey to the next level. There is only so much you can do from the spare rooms of a modest suburban house in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
After five years of struggle, including moving house five times in 30 months, we really couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. The birth of our third child in October last year meant that we now have three children (Laura, Alice and Philip) under three and a half.
I am exhausted after working 80 hours a week on this labour of love and Paula, rather than selling advertising and doing administrative work for Crikey, would like to resume her career as a family law barrister on July 1, 2005.
It is time to get a life again rather than literally working every day of the week on Crikey, including 6-8 hours every Sunday.
Despite the impressive growth of Crikey, financially it has always been a struggle and to this day we still have Crikey-related liabilities of almost $50,000.
Why Private Media Partners?
There was always only ever one natural buyer of Crikey and that was Eric and Di’s Private Media Partners. I know them having briefly written the “B*tch” column for their Text Media magazine The Eye in 1999. They have a vision to grow Crikey whilst retaining its present character and key contributors.
Eric Beecher made the following comments about PMP’s plans for Crikey:
“Crikey is something incredibly innovative, as there is nothing quite like it anywhere in the world. It was a momentous thing for Stephen Mayne and his team to invent and run.
“It is our intention to retain Crikey’s essential ingredients: disclosure, ferreting out important information that people don’t want you to know, being an active and lively part of the fourth estate that acts as one of the crucial checks and balances in the Australian democracy.
“Of course, we’ll do it in our own way, but we won’t be changing the fundamental role of Crikey – if anything, we hope to enhance it and take Crikey to its next stage of development as a distinctive and valuable part of the media landscape in a country that desperately needs more players in its media landscape.
“We intend to ensure that Crikey remains mandatory reading for anyone interested in politics, media, business, professions and other areas of society that matter to thinking people.”