Thomson Reuters puts peHUB, Buyouts and VCJ on block: sources

The auction is believed to be early. It’s unclear which banker is advising.

Interested buyers could include Mergermarket, Bloomberg News and The Street, one banker said.

PeHUB, Buyouts and VCJ are produced by Thomson Reuters’s Deals Group, which employs a dozen journalists. Buyouts is a bi-weekly magazine that covers news and trends in the buyouts market; VCJ is a monthly magazine that covers the venture capital business; and peHUB is a blog that covers PE and VC news.

The Deals Group also publishes peHUB Wire, a free daily email newsletter . The Wire reportedly has more than 60,000 subscribers. Subscriber numbers were unavailable for Buyouts, which costs $2,695 per year, and VCJ, which costs $2,295 annually. Thomson Reuters also doesn’t disclose the number of monthly unique visitors to peHUB.

In addition to publishing, the Deals Group produces several conferences a year under the PartnerConnect brand.

The media sector, which has been under intense pressure for the past decade, has seen quite a bit of activity recently:

• Last month Observer Capital acquired SourceMedia, publisher of American Banker andThe Bond Buyer, for an undisclosed amount.
• Just a couple of months earlier, Forbes Media announced that an investor group,Integrated Whale Media Investments, agreed to buy a majority stake of the company. Financial terms weren’t announced but press reports pegged the deal value at $475 million.
• And last November BC Partners acquired Mergermarket for 382 million pounds ($624 million). TheStreet Inc., a publicly traded investment news and data service, in 2012 acquiredThe Deal for $5.8 million. 

Executives for Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, Mergermarket and TheStreet could not immediately be reached for comment.

Luisa Beltran is a senior writer for sister website peHUB and a contributing editor at Buyouts