Some sports media news for y’all on a Monday afternoon.

Gannett and GateHouse (owned by New Media Investment Group), the two largest newspaper chains in the United States, today finalized plans to merge, the agreement coming about three months after the New York Times reported that talks had been taking place.

Here’s Jeff Blumenthal at the Philadelphia Business Journal:

New Media Investment Group (NYSE: NEWM) said it plans to acquire rival Gannett Co. for $1.38 billion in a stock and cash deal that will be financed partly by private equity debt. The two companies said with the increased scale from the combination, the new companies will be able to accelerate a digital transformation, realizes hundreds of millions in annual cost saves while continuing to invest in newsrooms.

After the expected closing by the end of 2019, both New Media and its operating subsidiary GateHouse Media, will be rebranded and operate under the Gannett (NYSE: GCI) brand with the company being headquartered in Gannett’s McLean, Va., base of operations.

Gannett locally publishes South Jersey’s Courier-Post and Wilmington’s News Journal. GateHouse, you may recall, bought Calkins Newspapers two years ago and made some changes that resulted in Kevin Cooney being let go and Tom Moore being moved off the Sixers beat and into a general assignment role. Those were just some of the cuts involving the Bucks County Courier Times, Burlington County Times, and Doylestown Intelligencer.

The third largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. is Media News Group, which owns the Pottstown Mercury, the Times Herald (Norristown), and the Delco Times, among other locals. MNG were also the jabronies who bought the Reading Eagle only to lay off something like one-third of the workforce.

But anyway, back to the merger, which now means that there might be some overlap at those five regional papers. Will there be more cuts? Will one or more of those papers be axed? Will they take stuff by Martin Frank (News Journal) and Dave Isaac (Courier-Post) and simply extend it to the other papers as part of the merger (and vice versa)?

Here’s what Blumenthal wrote about that:

A Gannett-GateHouse deal would consolidate ownership of the Philadelphia region’s newspapers even further. While not known for being as severe with its cost-cutting as MNG, Gannett and especially NewMedia have both had rounds of layoffs this year. General circulation newspapers have struggled in recent years to make the transition to digital-centric platforms as both advertising and print readership have experienced sharp declines.