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Independent newspapers are increasingly rare. The East Bay Express is the latest to join those swallowed by large corporations. 

New Times, the 30-year-old Phoenix-based corporation that bought the SF Weekly in 1995, will purchase the 22-year-old homegrown Express that began its days in small offices on Adeline Street. 

“The New Times group today announced it has signed a letter of intent to purchase the Express Publishing company, owner and publisher of the East Bay Express,” said Express Editor and Publisher John Raeside, who declined to discuss the deal, but instead issued a press statement. 

Raeside will stay on as editor and publisher, according to the statement. The deal, announced to the Express staff at 10 a.m. Friday, is expected to be sealed in two weeks, said one Express insider. 

One anonymous employee said what the deal means to employees is unknown, while another said it is believed that editorial positions will remain in tact and the paper’s contents will remain unaffected. “We’ll retain full editorial control locally,” the person said. 

“New Times also plans to add resources, beefing up the paper’s editorial, advertising and circulation departments to further fuel its already impressive growth,” according to the press release. 

Jim Larkin of New TImes did not return phone calls. 

The pending sale was news to media critic Norman Solomon, author of the Habits of Highly Deceptive Media. Solomon said that when corporations take over independent papers, “it tends to have a negative effect. It tends to homogenize” the paper, giving it a “cookie-cutter feel.” 

The Express has a circulation of 64,000, while the SF Weekly circulation is 129,000. When the Express is added to its totals, the New Times readership of its 13 weeklies will have grown to 1.2 million. The corporation also owns and operates the Ruxton Group, a national advertising sales group. 

According to the New Times Web site the chain has remained true to “a different vision.” It explains that the corporation was founded “by students at Arizona State University irate over the Vietnam-era shootings at Kent State University....As many daily papers shorten stories and hire consultants to tell them what to print, New Times papers thrive by cultivation networks of local sources, generating truly original story ideas, and digging into stories rather than skating across their surface.” 

The last local newspapers to be gobbled up by a corporation were the Hills Newspapers, including the Berkeley Voice, bought in August 1998 by Knight Ridder, Inc. The Hills newspapers are now published from the West County Times’ offices in Richmond.