washingtonpost

A group of fired Washington Times executives, led by the paper s founder and Unification Church patriarch Rev. Sun Myung Moon, has purchased the 28-year-old conservative newspaper from Moon s eldest son, saving it from a shutdown, according to a Times source.

Just four years ago, Rev. Moon had handed control of the paper to his eldest living son, Preston Moon, but now the church movement s leader and his team of executives are buying it back, in a deal meant to save the chief symbol of Rev. Moon s political legacy.

Members of the Times newsroom have an 11 a.m. meeting to discuss the sale, which was first reported this morning by Politico.

This summer, the newspaper s executives agreed to sell the broadsheet for one dollar and the assumption of millions of dollars in debt and liabilities, but have spent the last two months jostling over the sale s terms. The deal s completion marks the end of a tense two months of brinkmanship in which sources said Preston Moon came very close to closing the paper.

In the last two years, the Times s circulation has plummeted from 87,000 copies to about 40,000, and executives killed the sports and metro sections.