NNSL owner Black Press moves closer to sale, pays cyber ransom

Black Press Ltd, the chain of newsrooms that bought Yellowknife-based NNSL three years ago, is on the verge of completing a sale to a consortium including a US-based company.

Black Press went into creditor protection in January. The company, which employs 1,200 people across Canada and the US, has been posting losses of more than a million dollars a week.

In the NWT, NNSL publishes newspapers focused on Yellowknife, Hay River and Inuvik as well as a weekly territory-wide edition. Most of its staff in the NWT are based in Yellowknife. NNSL was privately owned until Black Press took over in 2021.

Since entering creditor protection, Black Press has been working toward a sale to a so-called stalking horse – a bidder whose offer is considered the minimum acceptable bid, in the hope of generating other proposals.

Court documents filed this week show nobody else came forward, despite more than 70 different prospective buyers being contacted.

The stalking-horse bid is from a consortium that includes Carpenter Newsmedia, a US company recently hived off from Boone Newsmedia, another US news conglomerate.

Carpenter operates newspapers across various southern US states.

The parties to the transaction are due in court next week to finalize the sale.

So far, there is no detail regarding what the consequences of that transaction will be for individual newspapers and subsidiary publishers like NNSL.

The court documents do, however, reveal one of the Black Press subsidiaries was the subject of a ransomware attack in January.

Hackers hit Black Press operations in Hawaii, the documents state, encrypting servers and reducing the group’s cashflow by US$200,000 a day.

“An initial ransom demand was received in the amount of US$4 million. However, this
amount was negotiated down, ultimately to the sum of US$150,000,” one document reports. That sum was paid to the ransomware group in bitcoin and access was restored.

The ransomware incident is stated to have cost the group up to US$750,000 (just over $1 million) including the fees of those who identified and fixed the breach.

NNSL has published the only printed English-language newspapers in the Northwest Territories since the Fort Smith-based Northern Journal closed in 2016.