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The Tribune Company is a Chicago-based media company, the United States’ second-largest newspaper publisher.
The Tribune owns 11 daily newspapers, including its flagship, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant. It also owns about two dozen television stations, along with the cable network WGN.
The company was born in 1847 with the launch of the Chicago Tribune and went public in 1983. The Tribune doubled its size in 2000 by buying the Times Mirror Co., which published the Los Angeles Times and Newsday.
Real estate magnate Sam Zell took control of the Tribune in 2007, making it private in an $8.2 billion deal that Zell later said he regretted. Zell quickly drew attention for his fiery personality and harsh style: Under Zell, the Tribune sold off Newsday in 2008 to pay off debt and made deep staff cuts at several of its papers, running out several newspaper executives when they refused to comply. Zell’s leadership was heavily criticized in the light of those moves and the company’s struggles.
The company began posting losses in 2008 and filed for bankruptcy later that year, the first major newspaper company to go bankrupt in more than 70 years. The paper emerged from bankruptcy on the last day of 2012 under the ownership of various creditors led by the Los Angeles hedge fund Oaktree Capital Management. The Tribune sold off majority ownership of the Chicago Cubs as part of bankruptcy proceedings in 2009. As it prepared to exit bankruptcy in July 2012, documents filed earlier that year indicated it planned to spin off many of its newspaper and broadcast units into separate subsidiaries, and it was reported in early 2013 to have hired bankers to sell its papers. Reportedly interested buyers included Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.
In 2008, Zell hired former XM Radio executive Lee Abrams as the company’s chief innovation officer. Abrams helped engineer several redesigns at the Tribune’s papers, though his breathless memos drew criticism in journalism circles.
The Tribune Co. gave the Associated Press notice in 2008 that it would drop the wire service in 2010, though it did not finally drop the AP until January 2013. The Los Angeles Times retains a contract with the AP.
The company has emphasized search engine optimization, with about 80 employees devoted to it and plans to stop duplicate content.
In 2011, the Tribune Company was reported to be developing a tablet which might be given to newspaper subscribers for free or cheap.
The Tribune began putting up online paywalls in 2011, starting with the Baltimore Sun. By October 2012, the Hartford Courant was the only Tribune paper without an online paywall.
In October 2010 the upper management of the Tribune Company came under fire after a New York Times report depicted a toxic working culture that started at the top with Randy Michaels, Tribune’s chief executive. David Carr, reporting for the Times, wrote: “Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.” It was shortly after that Abrams resigned from the company after sending a companywide memo deemed to be inappropriate. Within a matter days the Tribune board also accepted the resignation of Michaels.
In November 2010 the company’s creditors sued Zell and the banks that financed the sale of Tribune, accusing them of making the $8.2 billion deal while knowing it would lead to bankruptcy.
Financial Times is an international business newspaper based in London. The FT was founded in 1888 and has been owned since 1957 by the British publishing conglomerate Pearson, which also owns a 50 percent stake in the British foreign-affairs magazine The Economist. In late 2012, a change in Pearson’s CEO led to suspicions that the…
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