Latest Acquisitions Help Build Fledgling Adams Media Empire

Stephen Adams is a media mogul in the making.

The Minnesota native has interests in several industries, including banking and soft-drink bottling, but he is no stranger to the world of journalism. His late father, Cedric Adams, was a popular columnist for the Minneapolis Star.

Today, Adams heads a fledgling media empire that agreed this week to buy two Orange County newspapers--the Orange Coast Daily Pilot and the Huntington Beach Independent--and a suburban Detroit paper for an undisclosed sum.

In 1983, Adams launched his media firm with the purchase of WLIX (TV) in Lansing, Mich. His Adams Communications, headquartered in Wayzata, outside Minneapolis, eventually purchased nine more television stations and seven radio stations.

It also bought outdoor advertising companies and set up a second headquarters in Tampa.

Last year, Adams turned to print by buying controlling interest in Chicago magazine for $17 million and, soon after, a 50% interest in Metropolitan Detroit, a magazine started by former Detroit Free Press reporter Kirk Cheyfitz.

In buying the Detroit magazine, Adams stepped into a 3 1/2-year circulation war with Detroit Monthly magazine. The battle became so heated that each magazine had made an offer to buy out the other. Adams and other investors decided to sell the magazine to their competitor for $2.7 million.

Adams installed Cheyfitz as president of his publishing division, and the two quickly negotiated the purchase of the Macomb Daily, a 53,000-circulation paper in suburban Detroit. The purchase agreement announced this week includes the 39,500-circulation Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, another suburb of Detroit.

“The important thing to us is that we’re a group of three (daily) papers and a strong regional magazine,” Cheyfitz said. “We think we know local journalism.”