White Knight Turns Pragmatist, and Newspapers Tremble Again

WHITE KNIGHT TURNS PRAGMATIST, AND NEWSPAPERS TREMBLE AGAIN
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Katharine Seelye]
McClatchy sold The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the biggest paper in its chain, in December for roughly have what it paid for it. The sale sent a clear signal that some of the industry’s premier properties were eroding in value. Apart from its own woes, McClatchy’s sale of The Star Tribune could not have come at a worse time for the Tribune Company, which has been on the auction block since last fall. “It’s instructive that the billionaires floating around in L.A. and Boston who have expressed interest in some of these papers are all unsophisticated about the newspaper business,” said John Morton, an industry analyst. “They don't know what’s going on.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/business/media/12mcclatchy.html
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TRIBUNE LIKELY TO FORGO BIDS AND SET 'SELF-HELP' PLAN
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Sarah Ellison sarah.ellison@wsj.com and Dennis K. Berman]
In the end, nobody is helping Tribune Co. It is going to have to help itself. More than four months after Tribune put itself on the auction block, the newspaper and television concern is leaning away from accepting any of the offers made by outside bidders and instead opting for a restructuring it would do on its own. Billed as a self-help plan by the board members and advisers working on it, the plan is widely expected to involve spinning off the company's broadcast division and borrowing money to pay out a one-time cash dividend to shareholders. A self-help plan would represent an underwhelming conclusion to what has been a public tussle between Tribune and its biggest shareholder, the Chandler family. It would highlight the limited choices for newspaper companies facing restive shareholders and difficult business conditions, with readers and advertisers defecting from print to online media. One swing factor in the outcome has been determining the value of the company's TV stations. Private-equity firm Carlyle Group made an offer to buy the TV stations for about $4 billion, but talks between Tribune and Carlyle stalled as the two sides couldn't agree on price. Tribune eventually determined spinning off the stations was a better option because it could do such a transaction tax-free and avoid paying the taxes that would be involved in a sale to Carlyle.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117125060946505507.html?mod=todays_us_ma...
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