The acquisition comes amid a wave of business magazine M&A activity, including today’s earlier news that Reed Business Information U.S. has sold two of its library titles to MediaSource.

SEE ALSO: Updated: Reed Sells Library Titles To MediaSource, Publishers Weekly Left Hanging

Northstar CEO Tom Kemp told Folio that the company saw a chance to pick up a few mag brands fairly cheaply to help build up its travel titles. At the same time, companies like Nielsen and RBI have been having a difficult time supporting so many disparate business titles at a time when ad revenues for those properties aren’t keeping pace with the respective operating costs. Kemp says that while there will be some initial job cuts to eliminate redundancies, he says the Nielsen titles have been starved of necessary investment. He plans to rectify that and will staff up over time. That’s the same promise e5 Global Media, which now owns former Nielsen Business mags such as Adweek, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and others. Whether or not these smaller concerns can do a better job of running these mags is still a matter of wait and see, though mag ad spend declines have been slowing lately.