Mecom Group

» see mecom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

David Montgomery is a Belfast-born journalist who edited the News of the World and then Today, and then spent most of the 1990s running Mirror Group as its chief executive. In 2005 he set up Mecom Group in London and listed it on AIM the same year, with a straightforward idea behind it. Local newspapers in continental Europe were cheap and they held near-monopolies on classified advertising in their own towns. The cash they generated was predictable enough for a bank to lend against.

The buying started immediately. In 2005, alongside the American private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Mecom took Berliner Verlag, publisher of the Berliner Zeitung and the Berliner Kurier, which was the first time a major Berlin daily had passed into foreign ownership and which produced a political row in Germany that ran for months. The same year it bought Orkla Media, a Norwegian group that carried Edda Media at home and Berlingske in Denmark. Rzeczpospolita, a Polish national daily, came in the same transaction. In 2007 it took control of Wegener, the biggest publisher of local papers in the Netherlands.

By that year Mecom held around 300 titles across five countries and was the second largest newspaper group in Europe, with a stock market value of 1.2 billion pounds. None of the titles were British. Then advertising fell off a cliff in 2008 and the debt that had bought everything became the only subject anybody wanted to discuss. Montgomery lost the confidence of his shareholders and left the board. The six months to June 2012 produced 492 million euros of revenue and a 43.1 million euro operating loss.

~ the dossier ~

~ the buying spree ~

The thesis was not stupid. A regional paper in Norway or the eastern Netherlands in 2005 really was a local monopoly with a captive advertising base, and it really did throw off cash on a schedule. Leverage against that kind of asset was ordinary corporate practice, and Mecom was doing at speed what half the media industry was doing slowly.

What the model assumed was that the two variables would not move at once. The cost of the debt moved, and the classified advertising that was supposed to service it moved at the same time and in the same direction. Every title in the portfolio was exposed to both. Cars and jobs went online in all five of those countries inside the same few years, and property followed them.

~ the debt ~

Dismantling took longer than assembling. The German operation went to M. DuMont Schauberg in 2009. The Norwegian titles were sold off after that. A formal strategic review was announced in 2012, the stated reasons being poor trading conditions and advertising markets that stayed difficult.

The Dutch competition authority cleared a sale to the Belgian publisher De Persgroep on 11 February 2015. The scheme of arrangement became effective on 16 February and the shares were canceled off the London Stock Exchange. What was left of the group, mostly Wegener and the Danish business, went into a buyer that actually operated in those markets. The price was 196 million pounds for a company that had been worth 1.2 billion eight years earlier.

He was back inside five years. National World, a new vehicle he set up in 2019, bought JPIMedia at the end of December 2020, which is to say it bought the old Johnston Press titles, the Yorkshire Post and the Scotsman among a few hundred others, British ones this time rather than foreign. As of 2026, mecom.com is a parked page that says the domain "is reserved for future business initiatives," and the copyright line at the bottom belongs to DPG Media, the company that bought the wreck. A local newspaper is the most local business there is, and Mecom established that you could own three hundred of them from an office in London without being local anywhere.

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