LOS ANGELES : City’s Oldest Anglo-Jewish Weekly Sold to Australians

Los Angeles’ fourth-oldest newspaper, the 97-year-old B’nai B’rith Messenger, has been sold and major changes are planned for the weekly, its new owners said.

The city’s oldest Anglo-Jewish weekly was purchased by a group of Australian investors headed by real estate developer Joe Bobker.

The paper was sold to Bobker by outgoing executive editor Rabbi Yale Butler and his Pittsburgh-based family. The Butlers had run the paper for 12 years.

The new owners said they intend to debut a new format with the Jan. 13 issue that will have more of a magazine appearance, with a broader range of news and features.

Under Butler, the newspaper had come to be regarded as the “Orthodox newspaper” in Los Angeles, which with a Jewish population of nearly three-quarters of a million is the world’s second-largest urban Jewish community after New York.

For many years, the Messenger was the dominant Jewish paper in Los Angeles. But in the last two decades, it saw increased competition from Heritage, published by Herb Brin, and Israel Today, published by Phil Blazer.

The newest and most widely distributed Anglo-Jewish newspaper is the Jewish Journal, published for six years with subsidies from the Los Angeles Jewish Federation.