As the broadcast types would put it, this was BREAKING NEWS! the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported 12 hours ago:

Two storied media firms, Journal Communications Inc. of Milwaukee and E.W. Scripps Co. of Cincinnati, announced Wednesday evening an agreement to merge their broadcast operations while spinning off their newspapers into a separate company.

Under the deal, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will serve as the flagship of a new public company, Journal Media Group, which will be headquartered in Milwaukee.

Meanwhile, Journal Communications’ broadcast assets, including WTMJ radio and television, will be folded into Scripps, with the headquarters in Cincinnati. The E.W. Scripps Co. name will be retained and the firm will remain controlled by the Scripps family.

The deal follows a growing trend among media players to divide newspaper and broadcast assets into separate companies.

“Everyone wins,” said Steven J. Smith, chairman and chief executive officer of Journal Communications, who will serve as the non-executive chairman of Journal Media.

In addition to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Journal Media will consist of all of Scripps’ newspapers, including the Memphis Commercial Appeal, community publications and digital offerings. In all, the new company will operate daily newspapers in 14 markets.

The new company will have around 3,600 employees with expected annual revenue of some $500 million.

Journal Media will get a fresh financial start in an uncertain media world. The company’s balance sheet will have $10 million in cash and no debt, while Scripps keeps substantially all of the qualified pension obligations.

Timothy E. Stautberg, who oversees Scripps’ newspapers, will become CEO of Journal Media. …

“It’s going to be a larger company than we have today with more employees than we have today,” Smith said.

He added that he was also excited for the broadcast employees who currently work at Journal Communications.

“They are going to be part of a larger enterprise with even more resources to continue to serve their markets, and they’ll have our people grow professionally,” he said. “On both sides of this transaction we feel there is great value, great logic and a great cultural fit.”

Scripps will emerge from the deal as the nation’s fifth-largest independent TV group, with 34 stations. For the first time in years, it will re-enter the radio market, picking up Journal Communications’ 35 stations.

All told, the company will serve 27 TV markets and reach 18% of the nation’s households. Moreover, Scripps may become a key platform for political advertising with TV stations in eight battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. …

“I can’t think of two station groups that fit together more easily with more clear upside than when you put these two together,” said Richard A. Boehne, who will remain as board chairman, president and CEO of Scripps. …

In addition to the papers and their websites in Milwaukee and Memphis, the Journal Media Group will include the Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel; Naples (Fla.) Daily News; Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times; Ventura (Calif.) County Star; Scripps Treasure Coast (Fla.) Newspapers; Independent Mail of Anderson County, S.C.; the Redding (Calif.) Record Searchlight; Wichita Falls (Tex.) Times Record News; San Angelo (Tex.) Standard-Times; Kitsap (Wash.) Sun; the Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press and Henderson (Ky.) Gleaner; and the Abilene (Tex.) Reporter-News.

As you know, I am a twice-former Journal Communications employee, the first time voluntarily, the last time involuntarily. The first time I left an employee-owned company as a stockholder, though very small. Employee ownership is not the same thing as employee management, but it is a good thing for employees to have skin in the game, to be able to reap financial awards beyond a paycheck and occasional bonus for their work, and, because they have skin in the game, have interest in how the company is doing beyond their own corner of it.

(The craziest thing I ever did the first time I was at Marketplace was to fill out a Suggest and Share suggestion that the company buy the Milwaukee Brewers. This was at a time when Tribune owned the Cubs, Turner Broadcasting owned the Braves, and I believe the Texas Rangers were owned by a broadcaster too. I was told politely by corporate that Journal was not interested in buying the Brewers, but they were certainly interested in partnerships with the Brewers, and WTMJ has been their radio flagship all but two years of their existence.)

Journal Communications has always been the state’s biggest media company. The Milwaukee Sentinel was the state’s oldest daily newspaper (though not the oldest newspaper; I worked there). The Milwaukee Journal started after the Sentinel. WTMJ radio is one of the oldest commercial radio stations in the state, and WTMJ-TV was the state’s first commercial TV station.

The Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel were separate newspapers until 1995. The Journal was the afternoon and more politically liberal newspaper; the Sentinel was the morning and more politically conservative newspaper (its most prominent early editor, Rufus King, was prominent in the Republican Party, which as you know started in Ripon in 1854) of the two. (The Sentinel opposed slavery, but the Sentinel also opposed Fighting Bob La Follette.) Hearst Newspapers (started by, yes, William Randolph Hearst) purchased the Sentinel in 1924, as well as what became WISN radio. So Journal owned WTMJ, and Hearst owned WISN.

In 1962, Sentinel employees went on strike, and Hearst closed the Sentinel. Journal then purchased the Sentinel, and for 33 years Journal Communications operated them separately, as two editorial staffs, but one advertising, printing and delivery system. That was until 1995, when Journal combined the two newspapers as the Journal Sentinel.

So there is a little bit of wistful nostalgia in seeing the old company split up. Except that, when I went back to Marketplace in 2008, it wasn’t the same company. The print subsidiary, Add Inc, started as a shopper printer by former Waupaca-area radio station employees (one of whose sons started Marketplace and hired me, which I’m sure he doesn’t consider a career highlight), became Journal Community Publishing Group. The first time I was at Marketplace, there were, technically speaking, just three levels of management above me, and we were all employee-owners.

Journal went public between my departure and my return. Before I had left, Journal had purchased a couple of weekly newspapers and decided to expand them greatly to form what was called Fox Cities Newspapers — basically one newspaper per high school area (hence three in Appleton), with some common content, to compete against The Post~Crescent. I thought it was a good idea with too much front-end spending (a much bigger building that required substantial renovation and a cube farm, possibly too many employees, and somewhere I may still have Fox Cities Newspapers notebooks and pens). When 9/11 and the subsequent recession happened, Journal pulled the plug on Fox Cities Newspapers — too soon, in my opinion, though no one asked me.

The best thing I can say about my three-year return, other than that we did good work but obviously didn’t have enough advertising, was that it gave me the opportunity to be a publisher, and in fact the company’s first and last publisher/editor. (After having had four publishers, two of whom I loathed, in two years, I finally decided I wanted a shot at the job.) I was told when Marketplace closed that it wasn’t my fault or anything I had done wrong (I inherited a mess, about which my new bosses weren’t entirely forthcoming), and at least I could say that I outlasted the two antagonists above me, one of whom left with the magazine she had started, the other of whom was fired. It also gave me the chance to appear on WTMJ-TV’s “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes,” which is the most watched political pundit show in the state.

Being the biggest makes you the biggest target. Some people don’t like the Journal Sentinel because of its animus toward conservatives, both on the news side and on the opinion pages. (The latter has gone back and forth based on opinion page editor. What drives me nuts about the Journal Sentinel, and the Wisconsin State Journal and many other daily newspapers, is opinion by committee, where a group of people decides opinions. That gets you inconsistent opinions or, if consensus is required, mush. I haven’t done unsigned opinions for 20 years; my views are my own, and stated as such.) Some people don’t like WTMJ radio because of conservative hosts Sykes and Jeff Wagner, and its Right Wisconsin. Some people don’t like WTMJ-TV because of its veer toward tabloid news, mirrored at WGBA-TV in Green Bay.

Still, until this deal closes, Journal is a Wisconsin company. Lee Newspapers, publisher of the State Journal, the La Crosse Tribune and the Kenosha News, is not. Nor is Gannett, publisher of 10 daily newspapers. Nor is the owner of the NBC, ABC and Fox affiliates in Madison, the owners of the other Green Bay stations, the owners of the La Crosse ABC station, and the stations in Eau Claire and Wausau. Besides Journal’s WTMJ and WGBA, the only Wisconsin-owned TV stations are now WISC-TV in Madison and WKBT-TV in La Crosse.

The Journal/WTMJ operation was one of the last of its kind in the U.S. Every major city used to have a newspaper/radio/TV combination, usually the dominant media company in their market for obvious reasons. (You can tell who they are, or were, sometimes by the radio or TV station’s call letters; WGN stood for World’s Greatest Newspaper — in their opinion the Chicago Tribune. Not many Madisonians know that The Capital Times started WIBA radio, which is hugely ironic given WIBA’s conservative talk programming today, or that what now is Magic 98 and what used to be WISM radio in Madison started WISC-TV, or that WKOW-TV and WTSO radio, formerly WKOW radio, were owned by the same company.) The feds decided that was a bad thing in 1975, though Journal was grandfathered in.

While only 0.1 percent of U.S. companies are publicly traded, those are the biggest U.S. companies and employers, and public company stock — either purchased directly or in a mutual fund — is the number one place where investors put their money. So clearly publicly traded companies have an important role in the U.S. economy. (And as with all companies consumers have the ability to choose, or not, to buy something from a particular company, including, of course, newspaper subscriptions.)

My experience and observation, though, is that publicly traded companies are not necessarily where you want to work. Profit is the number one concern for a company of any size, but it sometimes appears as though profit is the only concern of some public companies. Decisions are therefore made based on quarterly earnings, which doesn’t really promote long-term thinking or planning. Big companies have, strange though this may sound, the worst qualities of unions, where everybody is treated the same, regardless of their actual contribution to the company, and it’s difficult to get rid of poor performers.

The splitting of print from broadcast strikes me as a mistake, though something other media companies are doing. The reason I think it’s a mistake is that I see print and broadcast in the process of merging into one single information source, with different delivery vehicles, thanks to the Internet — print if you want it, audio if you want it, video if you want it, available 24/7. Scripps and Journal’s merging and splitting off those delivery vehicles is the opposite direction of that trend, and you can guess whether print or broadcast was considered more important, particularly in these post-Citizens United days of political campaign spending.

The final bad thing that comes to mind is that this is yet another example of a Wisconsin company leaving the state by acquisition. (I guarantee you without researching the subject that Ohio’s corporate taxes and legal structure are better than Wisconsin’s.) As an employee it is good to work as far away from corporate headquarters as possible, but a company’s interest in corporate contributions to their community drops like a rock the farther you get away from the corporate offices. Journal was a huge presence as a corporate citizen in the Milwaukee area in its employee-ownership days; it probably dropped after the company went public, and it will drop even more with broadcast management in Cincinnati and not Milwaukee.

A Facebook Friend pointed this out:

“When completed, Scripps shareholders will own 69% of the broadcasting company and 59% of Journal Media Group. Journal Communications shareholders will emerge with 31% of the broadcasting company and 41% of the newspaper company.” <<< So bottom line, Journal Communications is being taken over by Scripps.

Readers know one of my favorite phrases is “change is inevitable; positive change is not.” The question is whether Journal Sentinel readers, WTMJ (and whatever 94.5 now is) listeners, and WTMJ and WGBA viewers will think this change is positive. From readers, listeners and viewers come advertising dollars, and from ad dollars come revenues.