Los Angeles Times' publisher is paying more than $80 million to buy another newspaper

The publisher of the Los Angeles Times has agreed to buy San Diego's dominant newspaper for $85 million, U-T San Diego reported Thursday.

It said Tribune will keep the San Diego newspaper as a separate brand while sharing stories, photos and other content with the Los Angeles Times.

Douglas Manchester, who bought the San Diego newspaper in 2011 for about $110 million, will remain owner of the U-T's headquarters in the city's Mission Valley area. He is seeking permission to build 200 luxury apartments there.

U-T San Diego says the deal is expected to be completed before June 30.

Ken Doctor of the Nieman Lab reports that before Manchester paid that $110 million for U-T San Diego in 2011, the company that owned the paper at the time - Platinum Equity - had bought it for a "botton-of-the-recession fire sale price" of about $35 million in 2009.

This new acquisition is being a called a sizable rebound for San Diego's biggest daily paper (circulation: roughly 183,500), but it's also a sign of the need for legacy newspapers to consolidate in order to survive.

The Oramge County Register, Southern California's 2nd-largest newspaper by circulation, is still trying to recover after a huge publisher shake-up earlier this year, and a failed attempt to expand into the Los Angeles Times' territory with a new paper, the Los Angeles Register, which never gained a foothold in the region.

The Tribune/U-T San Diego deal could expand the Tribune Company's Southern California reach from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.