Fifty years after the current location opened, the office building that houses the Brownwood Bulletin, located at 700 Carnegie, has been purchased by Michael Degal. The sale was finalized this past Friday.

Degal has been purchasing local properties for more than 20 years and owns storage locations at 801 W. Austin Avenue, 1616 Belle Plain, and 2016 Belle Plain, along with the Bluffview Drive-In property, the Bangs Nursing Home, and the peanut warehouse on Highway 377, among others.

Degal currently has no firm plans for the building.

“I’m an open book, open to entertain any thing that makes sense,” Degal said. “I’ve got a couple of options out there that may be prospects, but right now whatever the good Lord sends my way and shows me what to do with it, that’s what I’ll do.”

Anyone who has suggestions or ideas for the building are welcome to contact Degal at 325-642-9001.

“I’d love to hear input, what people think, if someone has an interest in it, I’d love to entertain any of those options,” Degal said. “I really don’t have any definite plans for it other than just maintain the property, keep it up and hopefully make something productive happen in the next six months.”

Degal said of the decision to purchase the building, “It’s in a prime location, it’s a big building, and it made perfect money sense for the structure per square foot. I just get led to these deals, I’ve got that gut feeling about it, of course you have to have a little bit of knowledge about what property’s doing to be able to understand a deal like that. It just came together.”

Degal learned the Bulletin building was for sale from a friend, Brandon Byars.

“He told me he threw my hat into the deal, and we always get into business buying stuff together,” Degal said. “Then they called me and I told them I was interested and these guys were coming down from New York. During this meeting, I thought I was going to be the only one at the meeting and I found out there was another real estate company and then there were some guys representing the appraisal district there.”

The Bulletin will maintain an office in the building as newspapers printed in Lubbock are delivered to Brownwood three times a week, weather permitting, and each edition is then distributed to print subscribers.

The Bulletin building opened in 1971, but has been closed to visitors since March 2020 when the COVID pandemic struck. The Bulletin dates back to 1886 and became a daily newspaper in 1900. First published as a daily Monday through Saturday, a Sunday edition was added in 1940. The Saturday edition was dropped in 1953, but reinstated in 2004. The Bulletin went back to six-day publication when it dropped the Monday edition in 2009. In 2005, the paper changed to morning delivery. Its publication cycle had previously been afternoon delivery.

The Brownwood Bulletin is now owned by Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper publisher as measured by total daily circulation headquartered in McLean, Virginia, in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Design of the Bulletin print edition was taken over by Gatehouse – which merged with Gannett in November 2019 – in that same year. The printing press at the Bulletin closed in June of 2020, as the newspaper is now designed and printed out of town and delivered to Brownwood three days a week.