Creative Loafing Atlanta was acquired today by Ben Eason, former CEO of Creative Loafing, Inc. and part of the Eason family that founded the company as a newspaper in 1972 in Atlanta. SouthComm, Inc., based in Nashville, acquired the Creative Loafing Media group in 2012 and will retain the Tampa-based Creative Loafing and Washington City Paper that were part of the original CL group. Terms were not disclosed.

Creative Loafing was founded in 1972 by Debbie and Elton Eason out of their home in the Morningside neighborhood of Atlanta. Their son, Ben Eason, went on to found Creative Loafing newspapers in Charlotte, NC, in 1987, and in Tampa in 1988. Ben purchased the Tampa paper from his parents in 1994 and changed the name to the Weekly Planet, and started up a second Planet in Sarasota in 1998. Two years later, Ben and siblings (aided by investors) bought the entire chain, including the papers in Atlanta and Charlotte as well as the Florida editions, and in 2006, changed the name of the FL papers back to Creative Loafing. In 2010 Eason and the family lost control of Creative Loafing, Inc. to its creditor Atalaya Funding in the midst of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing following the acquisition of the Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper that could not be sustained during the housing crash. In 2012 Atalaya sold the Creative Loafing, Inc. properties, including Tampa, to SouthComm, publisher of the Nashville Scene and other alt-weeklies around the country.

Ben Eason, who lives in Tampa’s Davis Islands neighborhood, subsequently founded The Networked Planet as an agency that provides digital programs for daily and specialty publishers across the U.S. As part of this work, Eason co-founded the adtech company AdTaxi Networks for the Denver Post and has been a digital consultant to Gatehouse Newspapers, Stephens Media, Flyer Publishing, Times Community Newspapers and Digital First Media. 

“We will miss having Atlanta Creative Loafing as part of the SouthComm family,” said SouthComm CEO Chris Ferrell, “but we are thrilled to have the brand reunited with its founding family.”

And no one's more thrilled than Ben Eason: “This is a proud day for our family and for me personally. I’ve been fortunate to have worked with some amazing technology people in the past 7 ½ years but this feels like coming home.”

 About SouthComm

Formed in late 2007, Southcomm is the nation’s second largest publisher of alternative weeklies, one of the largest publishing companies serving chambers of commerce, and a significant player in the B-to-B publishing world. The Nashville-based company now owns more than 30 titles targeting B-to-B and consumer audiences around the country. The company has offices in Nashville, Fort Atkinson, WI, Washington D.C., Kansas City, Cincinnati, Tampa, Arlington Heights, IL, and Florence, KY. For more information, visit southcomm.com.

This article appears in Feb 16-23, 2017.