The Denver Post is reporting that former Freedom Communications executive Michael Henry has been hired as the Post's new chief financial officer and senior vice president of finance.

Freedom owns the Gazette in Colorado Springs.

The Post's story notes that Henry worked at Freedom for 16 years, and quotes Ed Moss, the paper's president and chief executive officer, as saying, "Michael is a talented senior executive that will add significant depth and strategic thinking to our team in Denver and Digital First Media."

Meantime, the Orange County Register, Freedom's flagship property, reported April 17:

Ken Brusic, editor and senior vice president of The Orange County Register, was named interim publisher Tuesday, succeeding Michael Henry, who is taking a position outside the company. Brusic also will continue as editor.

Henry, who also served as the Register's chief financial officer, will be replaced in that role by Chris Dahl, director of internal audit for Irvine-based Freedom Communications Inc., which owns the Register. Henry has been with the company 16 years.

What, if anything, this means for the Gazette is unknown. Freedom recently appointed another interim publisher, Gene Carr, who replaced the previous interim publisher, Mike Burns, the Gazette reported April 18. Carr also is interim vice president of Freedom's southwest region and publisher of Freedom's McAllen, Texas, paper, the Gazette reported.

• The Gazette's Freedom Park for sale, along with the newspaper.

Freedom Communications, owner of our city's Gazette, keeps divesting itself of properties. This time, it's eight television stations.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Freedom Communications says it's closed the sale of its eight television stations, including one in Texas, to Sinclair Broadcast Group in a $385 million deal.

The transaction delivers to Baltimore-based Sinclair KFDM of Beaumont, Texas; WPEC-TV of West Palm Beach, Fla.; WWMT of Grand Rapids-Kalamazoo-Battle Creek, Mich.; WRGB and WCWN Albany, N.Y.; WTVC of Chattanooga, Tenn.; WLAJ of Lansing, Mich.; and KTVL of Medford-Klamath Falls, Ore.

Newspaper and broadcast industry struggles with ad sale declines left Freedom in Chapter 11 protection for seven months ending April 2010. Irvine, Calif.-based Freedom said in a Monday statement the sale leaves it "essentially debt free."

Freedom owns 100 newspapers, including four in West and South Texas. Sinclair now has 74 television stations in 45 markets, including Austin, San Antonio and Beaumont in Texas.

Here's Freedom's news release about the sale:

Irvine, CA, April 2, 2012 – Freedom Communications announced today that, with the preliminary final order secured from the Federal Communications Commission, the sale of its broadcast properties to Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. has closed. Completion of the sale leaves Freedom essentially debt free.

The final order from the FCC is expected by the end of the month.

Following announcement of the sale agreement last fall, Sinclair has provided television management services for the eight stations through a Local Marketing Agreement.

Moelis & Company acted as financial advisor to Freedom, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Latham & Watkins LLP acted as legal advisors.

About Freedom Communications
Freedom Communications, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., is a national privately owned information and entertainment company of print publications and interactive businesses. The company’s print portfolio includes approximately 100 publications, including 24 daily newspapers, weekly newspapers, plus ancillary magazines and other specialty publications. The Company also operates news, information and entertainment websites, as well as mobile and tablet applications. For more information, visit www.freedom.com.

We wrote about Freedom's sales of some of its newspapers in March here.

I hope by now you know that the Indy is now publishing on Wednesdays. (Catch all of our witty banter about "breaking up" with Thursdays?) But that doesn't just mean we go to print a day early, or give you an extra day to plan your weekend.

For those of you looking to submit events, it also means our listings deadline has changed.

That's right. Listings are now due Wednesday at noon for the following Wednesday's paper.

That goes for all music events, film screenings, art shows, poetry readings, things that appear in the section titled Listings, the section titled Playing Around ... you get it. I stress this because with our Wednesday-centric news cycle, our own in-house deadlines will be much more strict.

Remember, all of our listings are entered by myself and another staff member into our database, meaning they are curated, edited and, when necessary, clarified. This takes a lot of time, and there are dozens of listings submitted each and every week. (For more information on that, with old deadlines, read here.)

So as ever, the earlier you let us know what's happening, the better. Not only because you don't have to worry about deadlines, but because that allows us to plan greater coverage, should your event seem likely to attract widespread interest among our readers. Generally, we prefer at least three weeks' notice to put together a feature story: that's time to assign the reporting and writing, to allow the writer to conduct interviews and craft the piece, and then for us to edit, fact-check, and then design the page.

Lastly, it bears repeating that listings, like all editorial content, is completely separate from ads and anything happening in our sales department. Same goes for sponsorships through our front office or marketing departments.

The Gazette caught the eye of some Texas investors, but apparently a deal couldn't be worked out, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal story gives a rundown of the Gazette's parent Freedom Communications' efforts to sell its papers. Notably, it reported this:

A group led by Jeremy Halbreich, former chairman and chief executive of the Chicago Sun-Times, is in discussions to buy Freedom's papers in Texas.

The talks, which in some cases would include nondaily publications, are at various stages and might not result in any deals, a person familiar with the matter said. Talks with Anthem Newspaper Holdings LLC to buy Freedom's Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs, Colo., recently broke down, the people said.

According to a 2010 report on examiner.com, Anthem Holdings LLC owns about 6 percent of Dallas-based A.H. Belo Co. Belo owns The Dallas Morning News and other newspapers as well as KVUE, Austin’s ABC affiliate, and other TV stations.

Brian Ferguson, a principal owner of Anthem, has tried to buy several newspapers in recent years, including the Rocky Mountain News, Austin American-Statesman and the Honolulu Advertiser.

The Wall Street Journal also reported:

Since Freedom emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April 2010, the hedge funds that control the company have been trying to auction off its assets. Freedom last month sold its two New Mexico daily papers, the News Journal in Clovis and the Portales News-Tribune, to Clovis Media Inc. A few months ago, Freedom agreed to sell its eight TV stations to Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. SBGI +0.42%for $385 million.

Freedom was in talks last year to sell all of its more than 100 daily and weekly newspapers to Denver Post publisher MediaNews Group Inc. for around $350 million, but the deal got derailed because MediaNews had difficulty obtaining financing.

Meantime, the Gazette has posted the following jobs on Freedom's website: listings coordinator, designer, A&E editor, operations coordinator, reporter for the Air Force Academy's Spirit newspaper, which the Gazette produces, and copy editor.

By the way, the A&E opening results from the recent resignation of Warren Epstein, who led the newspaper's Dream City initiative.

Freedom Communications, the parent of the Gazette, has settled a class action lawsuit brought against its officers and directors by carriers who alleged they were unfairly labeled contractors and not paid for break time, mileage and overtime.

In a case filed in 2003, the carriers initially agreed to a $28.9 million settlement, but that was pared to $14 million during Freedom's bankruptcy a couple of years ago.

Subsequently, the carriers sued the officers and directors, leading to the recent settlement, which the Orange County Business Journal reports will be paid by insurance.

Meantime, back at the Gazette, the search is on for a publisher, according to this ad posted at Andrew Hudson's Jobs List.

Publisher
Colorado Springs Gazette
Colorado Springs, CO

Publisher Opportunity
Colorado Springs

Freedom Newspapers, Inc. is seeking an experienced, high impact player to serve as publisher for the Colorado Springs Gazette, a 75,000 circulation daily newspaper as well as its family of print and on-line portfolio (8.5 miliion page views). The Gazette, based in Colorado Springs, provides print and on line information services to El Paso and Teller counties of Colorado. Located just 70 miles from Denver, the population is diverse, among the most "wired" in the country and out door oriented. The area has a strong military presence and is home to both high tech and aerospace industries. We are looking for a strong, visionary leader with the ability to transform our organization and our product portfolio to meet the ever changing needs of our readers and advertisers.

Qualified applicants should have a bachelor's degree with a minimum of 5-7 years experience managing progressively larger media properties. Demonstrated ability to develop and drive overall business strategy and revenue initiatives is essential.

Qualified candidates will possess a track record of successful management experience and a desire to become actively involved with their team and within the community.

Interested applicants should submit a cover letter and resume via e-mail to freedomjobs@freedom.com attn: Marcy Bruskin, Vice President, Human Resources.

At the moment, the interim publisher is Mike Burns, Freedom's vice president of sales and market development, who presided over a Dec. 1 layoff of about a dozen employees — the latest of many layoffs there since 2007. Among those who departed in that wave was editor Jeff Thomas, who resigned. He was replaced by Carmen Boles, who has headed the paper's online operation and was given the new title of "content coordinator."

From Freedom's website:

Freedom Communications, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., is a national privately owned information and entertainment company of print publications, broadcast television stations and interactive businesses. The company's print portfolio includes more than 100 publications, including 26 daily newspapers, weekly newspapers, magazines and other specialty publications. The broadcast stations — five CBS, two ABC network affiliates and one CW affiliate — reach more than 3 million households across the country. Freedom's news, information and entertainment websites and mobile applications complement its print and broadcast properties.

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. If so, the Gazette must really like us.

Over the years, they've rewritten many of our stories. Some the day after we printed them. Some as much as six months later. Recently, yours truly has been the subject of the Gazette's admiration.

A few weeks ago, they basically copied my story on free speech zones. This morning, they copied my story about Mayor Steve Bach's maneuvering with the budget (check out mine and theirs). They even pulled some of the same quotes out of an e-mail chain as I did.

For the record, neither of those stories were easy to get. There are stories that you'll see popping up in all sorts of news media. They come from press releases, regular reports, big happenings, emergencies and comments made in meetings. Those types of stories are fair game, and no media should be expected to credit another when they write about them.

But other stories take time and more careful investigation. They come from something that a reporter discovers while working his/her beat, then carefully teases out through further investigation.

Getting a story like that the first time is difficult. For instance, it was weeks from the time I first heard hints that the budget process might not be going quite as it appeared, to the time I got my story. In between was a lot of hard work. Of course, once the story's been written and the information is out in the public, it's pretty easy to follow someone else's breadcrumbs and rewrite it.

I don't mind if the Gazette wants to rewrite our stories. Not to brag, but I think they're worth copying. However, it's only right to give credit where credit is due. It's called being transparent, ethical and fair.