Wednesday, January 31, 2001. 4:30 p.m. -- Sources say the long-anticipated sale of Fidelity's 100-plus Eastern Massachusetts newspapers to Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell will become final at midnight -- and that some big changes are in the works at the top of the masthead.

Vice-chairwoman and editor-in-chief Mary Jo Meisner, a former editor of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and alumnus of the Washington Post, is leaving the newspaper chain, as are two of her top deputies: Vicki Ogden, editor-in-chief of the metro papers (those closest to Boston, such as the Cambridge Chronicle and Somerville Journal), and David Trueblood, who supervises arts coverage chainwide.

In total, 36 employees of Community Newspaper Company (CNC), most of them on the business side of the operation, were let go. One major winner, though, was president and chief operating officer Kirk Davis, who'll keep his current job under the Purcell regime.

In another significant development, the Phoenix has learned that the Herald's managing editor for features, Kevin Convey, will become editor-in-chief of CNC. Convey is a key part of the trio that has run the Herald for some half-dozen years, the other players being editor Andy Costello and managing editor for news Andrew Gully.

The changes were announced at a meeting for employees at CNC's headquarters in Needham. By late afternoon, there was a companywide clampdown on official comment. An announcement was scheduled for 5 p.m. The announcement will reportedly reveal that Purcell has obtained financing for the deal -- estimated at $150 million -- from CIBC, but that it will not reveal the final purchase price or any other internal details.

Fidelity and Purcell announced last September that Purcell had agreed to acquire CNC, which comprises more than 100 papers, most of them weeklies, in Greater Boston and on Cape Cod. The deal was originally supposed to have been closed in November. But the announcement was delayed several times, reportedly because Purcell was having trouble obtaining financing in an increasingly soft economy (see "Don't Quote Me," News and Features, January 18).

Still, there have been numerous signs that the sale was still on track. CNC employees were recently told they would have to reapply for their jobs, and a redesign of the CNC Web site, TownOnline.com, was unveiled earlier this week -- certainly something that could not have taken place without Purcell's approval.

Fidelity first started acquiring newspapers about 10 years ago, and its stewardship of local newspapers has to be considered a disappointment. For years, Fidelity reportedly lost millions of dollars on CNC, sinking enormous sums of money into an integrated, computerized advertising system. In the past few years CNC became marginally profitable, sources say, but only by closing field offices, eliminating staff, and generally cutting the journalistic mission to the bone.

CNC's strength in Boston's affluent suburbs is the ideal complement to the Herald's urban readership, and gives Purcell a formidable base with which to compete with the dominant Boston Globe. First, though, he must figure out how to turn it into the asset that it never quite seemed to be for Fidelity.