New Owner Could End Era of Cuts, Uncertainty
“After an epic corporate drama, Chicago’s Tribune Co. sold itself in a deal that puts the 159-year-old media conglomerate in the hands of the city’s most iconoclastic entrepreneur, setting up a high-stakes bet that a pillar of the nation’s old-media establishment can tug itself into the digital future without toppling over,” Michael Oneal reported Monday morning on the Web site of the Chicago Tribune.
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“Early Monday, following a weekend of heated negotiations, the company’s board accepted a revised $34-dollar-a-share proposal from Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell to take the company private in a complex, $13 billion deal structured around an employee stock ownership plan.”
Though the sale is not final, the news could mark the end of a long period of cutbacks and uncertainty at Tribune Co. papers — which include the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Newsday and the Hartford (Conn.) Courant — that has taken its toll on diversity at the papers, even though diversity was one of the Tribune Co.’s stated values.
At Newsday alone, eight journalists of color have left the paper since December, some citing the atmosphere created by the continuing cuts mandated by Tribune. The Los Angeles Times lost two editors and two publishers over the demands for cutbacks, and they included Dean Baquet, who was the first African American top editor at the paper. He is now Washington bureau chief for the New York Times.
In December 2005, Ivan Penn, a reporter for 12 years at the Baltimore Sun, told Journal-isms he would not return to the Sun at the end of his Knight fellowship at Stanford University. “I’ve been concerned about the direction that Tribune has gone with the Sun,” he said. “When you’re looking at the landscape, when they’re closing foreign bureaus and reducing the staffs in Washington, you start wondering about what will be available to you.” Penn is now at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times.
At the Hartford paper, Jeff Rivers, who had been newsroom recruiter for 15 years as he performed other duties there, was told in 2004 that his was among seven positions being eliminated under cost-cutting orders from Tribune. He returned to newspapers only in January, as editorial page editor and a weekly columnist at the Herald News, a 30,000-circulation daily in West Paterson, N.J. He had been a public relations specialist for the Hartford Housing Authority.
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Ivan Penn |
It may be a new Tribune Co., but no one knows what the new owner will do.
“It was a relief to know that at last there’s an owner and a decision has been made and we can more forward from here,” Brenda Butler, senior features editor at the Tribune and president of the Chicago chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, told Journal-isms. “That’s what I think everyone in the newsroom is saying.”
The Tribune story said, “The transaction will place Zell, the motorcycle riding, epithet slinging multibillionaire, who just two months ago closed the $39 billion sale of his sprawling real estate company, atop of one of the most conservative, buttoned-down companies in America.
“It gives a risk-taking financier with no background in journalism control over a set of venerable newspapers that includes the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, and big television stations, such as WGN-Ch. 9. And by dialing up the financial pressure on Tribune, the transaction will force the company and its new employee owners to find answers to questions that have been bedeviling the newspaper and television industries ever since the Internet started stealing their customers more than a decade ago.”
Looking at the impact on their own paper, Thomas S. Mulligan and James Rainey added in the Los Angeles Times, “There are signs, however, that the final outcome might not have been determined for some of Tribune’s assets.
“Entertainment billionaire David Geffen, whose previous $2-billion offer for the Times was rebuffed, said he still had an interest in buying the paper.”
Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America, said in a statement, “Few details of the bid by Samuel Zell to buy the Tribune Company have been spelled out, other than the fact that an employee stock ownership plan will play a major part in the transaction. But this much is clear: The Newspaper Guild-CWA will do everything possible on behalf of union-represented workers at the properties and to look out for the interests of all 20,000 Tribune Company employees.
“The employee stock ownership plan — a significant part of this deal — can result in a positive partnership that benefits everyone involved or it can be a frustrating experience for worker-investors who end up bearing much of risk while experiencing little positive gain.
“We hope that this will not be the case as this transaction goes forward.”
- Hanah Cho and Nick Madigan, Baltimore Sun: Tribune Co. accepts Zell’s offer
- Susan Harrigan, Newsday: For Zell, one man’s trash is his treasure
- Michael Oneal and David Greising, Chicago Tribune: Entrepreneur faces daunting challenge
- Joe Strupp, Editor & Publisher: Tribune Newsroom Staffers Ask: Who the Zell Is This?
