Breakingviews to Become Part of Thomson Reuters

It's nearly the fourth quarter of 2009 and love is clearly in the air. Or at least the desperate urge to acquire media properties on the part of some large companies. Remember those crazy lovebirds Disney and Marvel tumbling into bed together in September, come hell or existing distribution deals with Universal, Fox, Sony, and Paramount? And what about Comcast (not to mention the possibility of Rupert Murdoch) chasing around NBC Universal like Pepé Le Pew, hoping to woo a controlling share of the company from Vivendi and General Electric? And then, of course, there was Bloomberg, which finally got hitched to BusinessWeek yesterday after a months-long courtship.

The latest hookup: Thomson Reuters has purchased Breakingviews.com, to bolster the company's forays into opinion writing, which includes hiring Portfolio.com's former Market Movers blogger Felix Salmon. "Based on the recent success of our strategy to move into commentary and the positive feedback we have received from Thomson Reuters clients, we are now seeking to accelerate our global commentary offering," Reuters editor in chief David Schlesinger said in a release.

As Richard Pérez-Peña pointed out in the New York Times, Reuters had hired Jonathan Ford away from Breakingviews to be the company's commentary editor a year ago: Looks like buying may be a shortcut to building here.

According to PaidContent's Joseph Tartakoff, the Breakingviews sale price is "roughly $18 million." (The Guardian's Katie Allen puts it at £13 million, or more than $20 million.)

It's worth noting, and not just for the sake of schadenfreude, that if that number is correct, Breakingviews, which debuted in 2005, sold for more than triple the highest figure of $5 million cited for the 80-year-old BusinessWeek. (The lowest figure was $2 million, so if Allen's higher figure is right, Breakingviews was valued at ten times BW.)

But then, PaidContent itself was sold to the Guardian Media Group in 2008 (after six years in existence) for "north of $30 million," according to All Things Digital's Kara Swisher.

Sadly, this is no country for old mags.