Lynne Marek

Corporate lawsuits are rarely riveting, but Tribune Media's $1 billion complaint against Sinclair Broadcasting is full of juicy details about an affair gone bad. Tribune Media pulled the plug in Aug in the proposed merger of the TV station operators after regulators signaled they would likely oppose it. The same day, Tribune filed a lawsuit in Delaware's state chancery court, blaming Sinclair for the failed deal.

Jack Ryan's 22nd Century Media suburban news business just keeps growing -- the 20th century way. Ryan is about to launch two more newspapers on the North Shore, with a Glencoe (IL) paper arriving in September and a weekly for Lake Forest and Lake Bluff starting by February.

Tribune Publishing CEO Jack Griffin isn't selling off newspapers. He wants to acquire more of them. Despite all the speculation about a sale of Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and/or the other Tribune dailies, Griffin is setting his sights -- at least at the start of his tenure at soon-to-be-independent Tribune Publishing -- on buying smaller newspapers in or near his existing markets.

“We think there are more of these opportunities around the country that are geographically adjacent to where we run big papers and big brands, and that over time we can achieve similar kinds of consolidation and acquisition opportunities that are going to add meaningfully to our footprint and our revenue and our profit,” Griffin said.

Hyperlocal news coverage on the Web has been touted as conventional journalism's best hope in the digital era. One big problem: No one has figured out how to make money from it.

In metro Chicago, the suburban Patch network has shrunk to a sixth of its former size to stem losses. Startup news organization DNAInfo Chicago has been pumping out neighborhood coverage on its website since 2012, while losing millions of dollars. And EveryBlock isn't even trying to make money.

No matter how compelling the news next door is, readers don't want to pay for it and local businesses -- the universally hoped-for sponsors of local content -- can't afford to advertise, or they pay so little that sales reps can't earn a living. As a result, when the starry-eyed backers of hyperlocal ventures get a grip on the mounting labor and overhead expenses, the experiments often end badly.