
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 21, 1994                   TAG: 9407250021
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: DANVILLE                                  LENGTH: Medium

WORKERS TO OWN DANVILLE PAPER

The 126 employees of the Danville Register & Bee will soon own their newspaper through a rarely used stock option arranged by the late owner and publisher in her will.

American National Bank and Trust Co., executor of the estate, said it reached an agreement to sell 100 percent of the company stock to the Register Publishing Co. Employee Stock Ownership Plan.

The proceeds from the stock sale, which will be completed this year, will go into a charitable trust established by E. Stuart James Grant's will.

Charles Majors, president and chief executive officer of the bank, said the sale will allow the funding of the E. Stuart James Grant charitable trust.

The beneficiaries of the Grant charitable trust include several local civic organizations, Virginia Military Institute, the University of Virginia, Averett College, Hargrave Military Academy and Red Hill Shrine in Brookneal.

The newspaper's publisher, Lawson Grant, and Majors would not comment Wednesday on the amount of the sale or the structure of the employee stock ownership plan. Grant said in a telephone interview Wednesday that he will not own a majority of the stock.

John Morton, a media analyst with the Lynch, Jones and Ryan law firm in Washington, D.C., said the value of a newspaper generally ranges between $900 and $1,200 per subscriber. The Danville newspaper has a daily circulation of 24,000, which would make it worth more than $20 million under that formula.

Newspapers rarely are sold to employees because it is more profitable to sell to newspaper chains, Morton said Wednesday.

``There aren't many, but this has been a technique that owners have considered rather than sell the newspaper to a chain,'' Morton said.

In the late 1970s, Congress set up tax breaks for employee stock ownership plans to help keep family-owned businesses from being absorbed into larger enterprises.

``It was created at least in part because of the concern that so many newspapers were being taken over by chains,'' he said.

Employees buy the fund that owns the stock and gradually accumulate interest in the shares until they ultimately own all of it, Morton said.

by CNB