NEW YORK — Digital First Media, the operator of The Denver Post and 13 other newspapers in Colorado, on Friday said it will “evaluate and consider strategic alternatives” that could lead to the sale of some or all of the company.

Investment adviser UBS Securities has been hired to review alternatives — including selling the entire company, selling regional clusters or doing nothing, CEO John Paton said.

“We believe we have many options available to us to maximize the value of our businesses for our stockholders and the board of directors has therefore decided to assess the full range of these opportunities,” Paton said.

New York-based Digital First said in a statement that there are no assurances the process will result in a transaction or transactions. The company said it will not disclose developments in the process until the board decides how it will proceed. It did not set a deadline.

Digital First Media was formed in December 2013 with the merger of Denver-based MediaNews Group and the former Journal Register Co. It is the nation’s second-largest newspaper company, based on circulation, operating in 15 states, with 800 multi-platform news and information products, including 76 daily and Sunday newspapers and 160 weeklies. The company said it serves 75 million customers monthly.

Its largest properties include The Denver Post, the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Daily News, The New Haven Register, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and The Salt Lake Tribune.

In Colorado, the company also owns the Boulder Daily Camera, Longmont Times-Call, Loveland Reporter-Herald, Cañon City Daily Record, Estes Park Trail-Gazette, and seven smaller papers on the Eastern Plains.

The company is controlled by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

Although Digital First has been approached by various interested parties over the past months, Paton said there have been no “formal or serious” discussions.

While the company could be sold in whole, or in regional chunks or expanded or not sold at all, “one of benefits of making these announcements is you end up testing the marketplace for all of those options, rather than doing it theoretically,” he said.

The combined companies are closing in on $200 million in digital ad revenue a year, he said. “The strategy we pursued was to put the companies together and to drive digital revenue relentlessly.”

At the same time, the spin-offs of print publishing by a number of media companies have received a good reception from investors, he said. “Over the past year what you have seen is a remarkable resurgence in the market, with the realization of the real power of media companies to go forward.”

Media analysts said it would be hard to find a buyer for Digital First Media as a whole, and that a more likely course would be for regional buyers to acquire pieces of the company.

“They could decide to break up the business into different operating entities — a Rocky Mountain cluster, an East Coast cluster and a California cluster,” said Alan Mutter, a Silicon Valley media consultant and former newspaper executive who blogs regularly on the state of the media.

While the company said there is no time limit on discussions, newspaper analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell, who first reported that Alden Global Capital was getting ready to sell Digital First Media, predicted a sale in the near future.

“I think we’ll see largely the dissolution of this company within six months,” Doctor said.

Digital First has been shedding real estate assets. Last month it put 51 properties on the market, including newspaper buildings in Akron, Brush, Burlington, Cañon City, Fort Morgan, Julesburg, Lamar, Longmont and Sterling. The Longmont Times-Call building sold Tuesday to a local investor for $2.4 million.

Media analysts have speculated about Digital First’s future since April, when it announced it planned to shutter Project Thunderdome, its experimental, centralized digital newsroom. Paton said Friday’s action is unrelated to Thunderdome, which was one of many digital experiments the company has undertaken under his leadership.

“The news information industry in America is undergoing a period of seismic change, defined by the need to consolidate to rapidly compete in a digital world,” Paton said. “The companies that will succeed are those which have meaningful scale and digital expertise. By anticipating the rapid revolution in our industry and responding to stay ahead of the curve, DFM has clearly emerged as a leading player, based on the high quality of our assets and the extensive work we have done to transform them into multi-platform products.”