WQED closed a deal yesterday to sell Pittsburgh Magazine to a Colorado media company.

The buyer, Wiesner Media, publishes magazines about business, cities, automobiles and homes as well as ColoradoBiz, a 35-year-old publication aimed at business executives, and Trucking Times, which focuses on the light truck and SUV accessory market.

The sale price was not disclosed. Pittsburgh Magazine Publisher Betsy Benson will continue to run the magazine here and will retain most of its 21-member staff, but accounting and Internet technology will be handled in Greenwood Village, Colo., home of Wiesner Media.

"It will be a monthly magazine. It will continue to go to our members and contain the "On Air" guide. An important part of this transaction was to ensure that our members will continue to receive the magazine," said George L. Miles Jr., president and CEO of WQED Multimedia.

WQED has reduced salaries and cut costs. "We were on target to break even this year, with or without the sale of this magazine," Mr. Miles added.

What the magazine needed "was an injection of an investment to really make it grow. We never had the resources," Mr. Miles said. "The decision was a strategic one as opposed to a budgetary one. With the monies I get from this, I'll be able to invest in other products which go into our main mission."

The profitability of all print publications, he added, "is down a lot since 2001."

Dan Wiesner, chief executive officer of Wiesner Media, a privately held, family-owned company located 10 miles south of Denver, has been visiting Pittsburgh since last year.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Mr. Wiesner said the magazine's content will be directed by Ms. Benson and is not expected to change. He said the magazine's Internet presence will be improved and that his company, which has 25 employees, hopes to acquire more city-based magazines.

"We're planning on building a group of regional city magazines. This is the first brick in the build-out of a regional media company, and Pittsburgh is the perfect place to start," Mr. Wiesner said.

Metropolitan magazines, he added, "are a good product. If you combine some new, online extensions and kind of maybe take a piece of the newspaper pie that's going other places in these cities, they do very, very well."

As for the magazine's Web site, he said, "We'll be online and we'll be online in a big way. We're just going to make it better with more traffic."

With regional magazines, Mr. Wiesner said, "You're trying to build a cluster of products in a category. They have synergies and it's really fun. I was looking for big cities. This was the one we picked."

Pittsburgh Magazine began in 1969 as a WQED program guide called "QED Renaissance" and evolved into a regional publication. It was one of the last magazines published by a public broadcasting station; WQED continued to produce the publication for more than 19 years after stations in other markets -- Chicago, San Francisco and New York -- sold their magazines in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Included in the sale are Pittsburgh Magazine's annual City Guide, Home and Garden Magazine and Pittsburgh Weddings.

Mr. Wiesner, 47, will be visiting the city Monday and Tuesday.

Typically, magazines sell for 4 to 41/2 times their earnings. In the mid to late 1990s, Pittsburgh Magazine had a 12 to 13 percent profitability, making it one of the most profitable metropolitan magazines in the country. Other regional magazines, which lacked a built-in circulation from a base of public television station members, had to content themselves with 4 percent profit.

In the late 1990s, Pittsburgh Magazine also expanded its brand by producing niche publications -- a city guide, a bridal guide, a home guide and a restaurant guide.

But in the last several years, new magazines -- Whirl, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pittsburgh Professional, Table and Maniac have carved out pieces of the advertising pie.

Mr. Miles said the magazine has a circulation of 50,000 -- 20,000 independent subscribers who are not members of WQED and 30,000 WQED members who receive it at as a premium when they pledge.

The magazine sale, Mr. Miles added, "doesn't solve our budgetary concerns with state government. It positions us strategically. We need to make sure all our limited resources go towards the electronic media. That's what this was about. This wasn't about trying to shore up the budget."

Mr. Miles said Pittsburgh Magazine staff will remain at WQED's Oakland building for about nine months and then find other space.

"It will be morphing into an independent magazine. Wiesner Media will have editorial control."

Mr. Miles believes Wiesner Media is "culturally aligned" with the city and the magazine's culture.

"I didn't want someone to come in and destroy the culture of the magazine. We wanted to make sure these were respectable publishers."

Mr. Wiesner made at least three trips to Pittsburgh after WQED signed a non-binding letter of intent. He toured the city, met the magazine staff and reviewed the magazine's business records.

"I love your city," Mr. Wiesner said yesterday. A native of Chicago, he spent much of his adult life in Denver and graduated from the University of Denver.

Dan Wiesner, the second eldest of five boys and one girl, works with his brother, John, in the family business, which publishes shelter magazines such as Mountain Living and home publications in Atlanta, Seattle and St. Louis.

"I travel a lot. Media is a blast. You're in the middle of the action."

His 72-year-old father, Patrick, started the company 27 years ago with two magazines -- Private Cable and Mobile Radio Technology. Private Cable went to the 12,000 installers who put private cable systems in hotels; the radio magazine was aimed at tow truck drivers and cement truck drivers who installed radio technology in their vehicles.