Good news for Tucson

[Drip]

Looks like there may be a buyer.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003952445

 

[mustangj17]

Re: Good news for Tuscan

If Gannett finds a buyer, do they still get 1/2 the profits from the JOA? Man they would make some good money on that. Line some more pockets at corporate.

 

[JayFarrar]

Re: Good news for Tuscan

Good news indeed

The announcement threw the staff into turmoil, with a series of questions concerning how much longer the paper would be staying in business, what would become of promised severance packages and what would happen if the paper were sold and not all present employees were retained.
"There is some hope that could come out of this ... that we could have a new owner with a functioning newspaper, with the staff employed," science writer Alan Fischer said. "On the other hand, it's very disconcerting to be told that you're going to be closing down."
"We have people here who made plans, who have new jobs that start on Monday and who could potentially lose their severance packages because of that, so it's kind of thrown everything into kind of an uproar here," he added.

 

[Andy _ Kent]

Re: Good news for Tuscan

Looks like there may be a buyer.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003952445

Whoa!! Something's amiss here. Any chance in light of the Justice Department investigation that Gannett softened its stance on not including its portion of the JOA in the sale? Otherwise, who in their right mind would buy that paper with the JOA structured as is?

 

[Drip]

If you're a Citizen scribe and got a job lined up, do you stay or leave?

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

Looks like there may be a buyer.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003952445

Whoa!! Something's amiss here. Any chance in light of the Justice Department investigation that Gannett softened its stance on not including its portion of the JOA in the sale? Otherwise, who in their right mind would buy that paper with the JOA structured as is?

A piece of the JOA is almost never offered to a new buyer, and I don't think Justice would force that. No precedent for forcing that in other JOAs.

My guess on a buyer would be Wick Communications, which owns publications in Tucson and throughout Southern Arizona. Or an indy buyer who has reached an agreement for Wick to do the printing.

 

[Andy _ Kent]

Looks like there may be a buyer.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003952445

Whoa!! Something's amiss here. Any chance in light of the Justice Department investigation that Gannett softened its stance on not including its portion of the JOA in the sale? Otherwise, who in their right mind would buy that paper with the JOA structured as is?

A piece of the JOA is almost never offered to a new buyer, and I don't think Justice would force that. No precedent for forcing that in other JOAs.

My guess on a buyer would be Wick Communications, which owns publications in Tucson and throughout Southern Arizona. Or an indy buyer who has reached an agreement for Wick to do the printing.

Frank, I appreciate the insight. I guess what I was getting at had to do with the "highly unusual" guidelines Gannett was imposing and how the Justice Department was looking into those, and also what I posted earlier on the other Tucson thread about the sinister appearance of that amendment to the JOA.

 

[OTD]

If you're a Citizen scribe and got a job lined up, do you stay or leave?

If it's out of newspapers, you bail.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

Frank, I appreciate the insight. I guess what I was getting at had to do with the "highly unusual" guidelines Gannett was imposing and how the Justice Department was looking into those, and also what I posted earlier on the other Tucson thread about the sinister appearance of that amendment to the JOA.

Well, the "highly unusual bidding rules" was just a bad subhead on the Gannett Blog. What the story actually said is that it would be "highly unusual for the government to impose specific conditions requiring the production and sale of a printed version of the paper."

Also, there is always going to be a Justice Dept. investigation of some sort when a JOA is involved. Usually, a citizen's group of some kind will file a lawsuit eventually and Justice has to show it looked into the closing before rubber-stamping it. In San Francisco, after Hearst paid a "buyer" more than $60 million to take the Examiner off its hands (outside the JOA, of course) and thus preemptively avoid antitrust problems, someone still filed a lawsuit, claiming Hearst didn't try hard enough to find someone who would actually compete aggressively with the Chronicle. Justice knows someone's gonna sue, so it will investigate as a matter of course.

I'm not trying to defend folding the Citizen, but I think Gannett and Justice have done SOP. The only thing that's new is the supposed requirement that a buyer commit to publishing a print product. But I suspect that's because no one had thought of specifying that before. The idea that someone might go Web-only is a pretty new one.

Except for the obligatory lawsuits by the locals, closing one of the papers in a JOA is usually pretty smooth sailing, as far as the law goes. The exception was in Honolulu, where an injunction prevented Liberty Newspapers from folding the Star-Bulletin in exchange for more than $20 million from Gannett, which owns the Advertiser and formerly owned the Star-Bulletin before arranging a swap of the two papers. After the injunction, the court supervised the search for a buyer and eventually David Black took it. It usually doesn't work that way -- Justice usually won't micromanage the search for a buyer to that degree.