Tribune company bids?

Per Bloomberg (Tribune Publishing Gets Bids From McClatchy, Donerail)

*-Donerail Group (have no idea who they are)
*-McClatchy
*-AIM Media (based in Texas, owns a bunch of small community newspapers in Texas, Ohio & Indiana, not sure if anywhere else).

 

Donerail is an investment firm. It is believed if they bought the chain they would then try to sell the papers individually.

Interesting that Gannett, who tried to buy Tribune a couple years ago, is not a player.

 

Interesting to see what happens if they sell the papers individually, though.

Several gutted their copy desks and are designed in Chicago. You buy Hartford or Orlando or Fort Lauderdale, are you going to have to re-hire a desk to put out the print product? And even before that, for a decade a central desk in Chicago was producing "modules" (full pages, half pages, quarter pages, etc.) for editorial use that did not require any desk work from the paper, other than dragging the module onto whatever page you wanted it to run.

 

There are options to hire out the design work. Gatehouse, for example, designs a lot of papers not in their chain.

 

Fixed.

 

One of the delays in the sale of the LA Times was that the new owners and Tribune were negotiating agreements for all the interrelated activities.

I think this sale will send a signal as to the future of stand alone newspapers. According to Ken Doctor's Newsonomics blog Donerail has been struggling to find buyers in individual markets. If Tribune can not find buyers for stand alone papers in markets the size of Chicago and Orlando it means the stand alone paper is on its deathbed.

 

Or papers sold individually will be purchased by existing chains with that infrastructure, who can add another paper to their universal desk.

 

From pixels to Pulitzers.

 

Shitty company bought by shittier company:

Nexstar to Acquire Tribune Media for $4.1 Billion

 

Looks like this is the TV side, which IIRC was spun off from the newspapers a while ago.

 

Correct. The spinoff occurred in 2014, forming Tribune Publishing and setting the stage for the ill-fated Tronc experiment. The latest is that Donerail and AIM have joined forces to pursue the publishing company, with H. Ross Perot reportedly one of the backers.

A funny/sad aside I've heard about recently is that several former co-workers who go back to the days of Tribune pensions have called Tronc/Trib Publishing over the past six months asking about the status of their benefits. They've been told, "Sorry, we can't help you; we have nothing to do with that." If you have a pension, you have to call the Transamerica money management company, which handles the "old" Tribune Co.'s pension fund. Everybody was supposed to receive a letter about this, but either not everyone got one or some folks ignored it.

 

If you're a sports anchor at a Tribune TV station, start brushing up your resume.