A few weeks back we caught wind of talk that Zell would give up his stake of the company and walk away, head hung low but relatively intact. Well, now anonymous sources say that the "jury is still out" on Zell and that he may, in fact, be sticking around. Wha?!

Apparently the company's creditors, who supported bankruptcy, aren't entirely sure if they're ready to give him the boot. Nor is he necessarily ready to leave the company, which he helped take private back in 2007.

Now the company's barreling toward its inevitable restructuring and hoping it can salvage something from this fucking disaster. Still, despite the doom and gloom hanging over the company, chief operating officer Randy Michaels recently sent out a memo in which he asserts the managing team, which includes Zell, and its lenders are happy with the ways things have been going.

While the ownership structure of the company is likely to change, current operating management is committed, and intends to remain in place during and after the restructuring.

Why? We haven't the foggiest. Zell's 2007 privatization only brought on more debt. He also reportedly dragged his feet on selling the Chicago Cubs, which brought in a scant $845 million and his presence created a general sense of unease for the company, its staff and the rest of us.

In the meantime, the company's negotiating its new structure and hopes to clear itself of nearly $12 billion in debt. It's good to have goals. Of course, the company's being sued by bondholders and employees who saw failure from the get-go. Perhaps they should be in charge?

Newser.com, the aggregation site run by Most Important Man In The Media Michael Wolff, has seen its traffic fall by about two thirds since May. This is directly attributable to Michael Wolff being annoying.


Rupert Murdoch's paycheck this year plunged 40%, to $18 million. His wrinkles held steady, at a skillion. Tangentially related: News Corp is folding its free London commuter paper.

The latest on the Tribune "saga," of Sam Zell slowly being shown the door, and told to walk the fuck through it:

Tribune Co. said its ownership is likely to change as the newspaper-and-television company emerges from bankruptcy-court protection, a shift that people familiar with the matter say would likely put the company in the hands of its lenders and shrink primary debt by more than 90%.

Lefty magazine The Progressive, needs to raise $90,000 in the next two weeks or it will fold. Now you cannot cry ignorance.

Is this the end of Sam Zell, failed newspaperman? The NYP says the gnomish, mean rich man is "on the verge of giving up his claims to buy a huge stake in the company and, according to a source familiar with the matter, is ready to walk away from the company." Tribune Co. employees—whose money Zell used to buy the bankrupt company—will be happy to see him go. But not as sad as they were to see him come.


A federal judge ruled that former WSJ assistant managing editor Carolyn Phillips can pursue her lawsuit alleging that Dow Jones fired her in 2002 because she was black. The WSJ's former editors deny it all. And Rupert Murdoch is just cold sitting back being like "I didn't even own the paper back then, suckas." Then he fires a black person somewhere, just for fun.


Former NYT Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman didn't like the NYT's (pretty awesome I thought!) profile of Harvey Weinstein last weekend—for one thing it was by a reporter Waxman referred to as "David Segal (um, who?)." Turns out she worked with him at the Washington Post and even shared a byline with him. Our editor Gabriel Snyder knows Hollywood and would probably have something insightful to say here, but unfortunately I have no idea who Gabriel Snyder is.
[New insta-joke: "UM WHO?" Haha!]


"Huffington Post + Facebook = the Future of Journalism." No.

Highlights of Sam Zell's tenure as America's most horrific newspaper company owner:

• Zell, who knows nothing about newspapers, buys the Tribune for $8 billion in 2007, at the very very last moment anybody could semi-plausibly argue that maybe, somehow, a newspaper company could do well again, one day. Good start.
• Everybody's kind of enthusiastic about this crazy bearded upstart, at first!
• Zell tells a journalist he employs: "Fuck you."
• Lee Abrams.
• Mid-2008: Things at the Tribune papers are going... not so well.
• Tribune Co's most coveted asset: Its parking lot.
• Zell sued by his own employees at the LA Times. Employee relations are...not so good.
• In December, Tribune goes bankrupt.
• And now, the reorganization plan indicates that Zell might be getting out of the game:

  Bankruptcy experts said the plan's outline raises questions about whether the senior lender group would want to retain Zell and his management team or seek new leadership for the company. It also poses the question of whether Zell would want to stay without a large ongoing stake in the company.

Sam Zell now admits that his hugely leveraged purchase and subsequent destruction of the now bankrupt Tribune Co. just before the definitive crash of the newspapers business was "a mistake." No shit! So was hiring Lee Abrams, dude. If it makes you feel any better, Sam, Chicago's homeless paper is doing bad too. And New York magazine can't even afford large font!


James Renner, a reporter for the alt-weekly Cleveland Scene, got fired, apparently for sass-talking the paper's owner after the owner decided to spike a story about an affair-having state senator. Now the writer says he's going to file a wrongful termination suit, and, more importantly, he sent the entire spiked story to a blog, which published the whole thing. Streisand effect!

Spotted at the Grey Gardens premiere in NYC last night: NYT publisher Pinch Sulzberger commiserating with PR man Dan Abrams! "They were all smiles and buddy-buddy touches," reports Choire Sicha, spy. He also overheard recently canned Fox gossip columnist Roger Friedman "telling people that the firing was entirely News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch's doing." Parties are a great place to spy!


This whole "the Boston Globe may be closed" situation: what does Ben Affleck think about it? The best actor to ever come out of Boston gave this actual quote to a Globe reporter: ""I fundamentally misunderstood what was going on. Boston.com has 5.6 million readers a month, and yet this hugely successful news gathering operation is going out of business." Which is immediately followed in the story by this parenthetical: "(For the record, Boston.com had 5.7 million unique visitors last month.)" Once again, Ben Affleck has ruined everything.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: "I'm absolutely sure each of the Time Inc. brands I work on will be standing after we're all gone." We'll all be gone next week.

PR trade mag PRWeek (my former employer) is scrapping its weekly print edition and going monthly, starting in June. They'll keep putting out daily news and weekly newsletters online. No, they're not changing the name.

On Sunday, the Calendar section will be wrapped in a four-page supplement designed to look like LA Times content, LA Observed reports. In reality, the content is advertising copy for the movie The Soloist.

To make the supplement especially confusing, it contains a Q&A with an actual columnist for the newspaper, Steve Lopez, whose book inspired the movie.

The Soloist, by the way, is about a journalist "disenchanted" because "the newspaper business is in an uproar." The journalist (Lopez) becomes inspired by a street musician, writes a series of columns about him and becomes determined to turn the guy's life around.

But no one reads the columns, because they come buried under and surrounded by lookalike ads. Wanting for readers, the newspaper goes bankrupt; the street musician languishes in obscurity, destined to live out his days penniless and alone. (We're joking about this terrible ending, of course. Like that could ever happen.)

The New York Times is going to fold its City section as part of the cost-cutting package that came down last week, to save money on freelance payments and whatnot. This is not only disastrous for the Columbia J-school freelancers and other assorted mortals whose only hopes of getting an NYT clip was through the City section; it's equally bad for regular NYT reporters, because this is a mere foreshadowing of a coming trend called "write more stories or else." But without the City section, how will we ever know what's happening in McCarren Park's ironic sports leagues, or other places that freelancers hang out on the weekends? Democracy is dying.


Brazil's president said "white people with blue eyes" were the villains of the financial crisis. Turns out he was talking about Sam Zell.


Great Magazine Die-off: Hachette has apparently put design magazine Fulcrum on hold, and prospects of its revival don't sound too promising, judging from the linked internal email. If you know more, email us.


A rumor is Going Around that Nielsen will either fold Brandweek and Mediaweek into Adweek, or shrink the three titles down to two. The magazines have all been had their staffs and resources slashed recently, so this would be the next logical step. There's really no getting around the fact that Ad Age eats just about every trade magazine for lunch. [Disclosure: I've had/ have friends working at Brandweek and Adweek and Ad Age. Still Ad Age is the best.]

Dylan Ratigan, who, it's widely speculated, will soon be quitting his gig as host of CNBC's Fast Money (not long after a tape of him cussing out his producer surfaced), tells Jon Friedman that he plans to pursue the story that "The value system of capitalism has been corrupted by a small group of bankers, insurance executives and politicians." Is Dylan Ratigan the first CNBC personality shamed into quitting by the rhetorical power of Jon Stewart? I don't know, but it's an angle!

In the summer of '06, Tierney and some wealthy Philly-area investors purchased the papers from McClatchy for more than $500 million. (Fast forward through a brief early period of cautious hope, followed by a painful extended period of wring concessions and budget cuts from the newsroom).

Last weekend the papers declared bankruptcy. The day-after story, gleefully reported by the bankrupt papers themselves, among many others, was that Tierney had awarded himself more than a 30% raise last year, even as the company was bleeding money. Then yesterday Tierney was forced to give up that raise. Today, he said that, hey, you ungrateful bastards, the bankers offered him a cool million to lead the company if he'd make even worse cuts, but he was too good of a guy to do it:

"For the last several months and up until the moment we filed [for bankruptcy on Sunday], they wanted me to stay and offered me a handsome compensation plan and a piece of the company," Tierney said.

He's a prince! He also vows to "never" close the Daily News no matter what, which is more of a play for sympathy from his employees than anything else, considering the amount of debt he's up against. It's not working. If Tierney had in fact led the papers to success, he might have been popular. But his business failure just reinforces the opinion of journalists who hated him before he ever became their boss—because he was a hardcore Republican flack who enjoyed complaining to editors about their reporters' work. One reporter he clashed with bitterly said:

"Reporters, we go looking for the truth. This guy, he goes looking for a wrestling match, and the stronger advocate prevails. If he has to pop your shoulder out of its socket, so be it," Cipriano says. "He doesn't understand what we do. He doesn't respect what we do, and he doesn't think we should be doing it... I don't see how a guy like that can run a newspaper and not just turn it into another extension of the spin machine."

He's an assertive, mouthy businessman with no newspaper experience who bought big into the industry at exactly the right time, vowed to turn around a failing paper, and instead rode it into bankruptcy, earning increasing wrath from the newsroom while doing so.

So basically Brian Tierney is Sam Zell with hair. But he does smile occasionally, so cut him some slack. [Pic via]

The problem with lists of billionaires' paper losses, like the one Henry Blodget's Business Sheet has assembled, is that they're frustratingly free of context. Did a particular CEO do anything to make his company's shares worthless, or was he just buffeted willy-nilly by the crashing stock market? Is Rupert Murdoch $3.5 billion poorer because he's a bad manager, or just unlucky? Instead, we're left knowing that they own many millions of shares in their companies and those shares are, ohmigod, totally worth less now than they were last January! That's about as much fun as reading companies' annual proxy statements.

What this list needs is a dose of schadenfreude. Here's an edited version, including only those people we really are happer to see poorer:

• Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, -$3.3 million: Totally deserved, for installing Randy Falco, a useless broadcast-network flunky, as CEO of AOL, thereby destroying whatever remaining value the Internet portal had.
• Roger Ailes, head of Fox's local TV stations and Fox News Channel, -$3.5 million: This News Corp. executive deserves a net worth chop — not for the maddeningly popular Fox News, but for the laughably unwatched CNBC wannabe he championed, Fox Business Network.
• James Dolan, Cablevision scion, -$13.1 million: Bought Newsday, and then gave an interview to a company-owned cable network rather than to the newspaper, which, frankly, could use some help filling column-inches.
• Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., New York Times publisher, -$76.7 million: Almost let the Times run out of cash so his cousins could keep getting paid millions of dollars in dividends by the family-owned paper. Also, rumored to be in annoying relationship with Caroline Kennedy.
• Sam Zell, CEO, Tribune Co., -$315 million (maybe): Zell might lose his investment in the bankrupt Tribune — but he's not out nearly as much as his employees, whose stock-ownership plan was used to buy the newspaper-and-TV conglomerate.

Here's the whole list. Bravo if you can make it to the end — at which point you will learn that you never really cared about EchoStar CEO Charlie Ergen, the richest media mogul you've never heard of and for good reason. Also, you'll wonder why media CEOs aren't more photogenic.

(Photos via the Business Sheet; clockwise from upper left: Bewkes, Sulzberger, Zell, Dolan, Ailes)

It turns out the term "perfect storm" is barely 10 years old and is actually derived from the book of the same name, later made into a movie. In the short interim period the "perfect storm" has become the perfect bleat for whiny businessmen everywhere.

The latest is Sam Zell, who blamed the bankruptcy of his Tribune Co. on a "perfect storm," even though print media was clearly in trouble when he announced his acquisition plans last year and he chose to load the company with a crippling amount of debt.

Normally awesome James Surowiecki of the New Yorker followed right behind, saying in the column published tonight that whole newspaper industry is in the midst of a "perfect storm," as though it hasn't been gouging classified advertising customers, ignoring problems of journalistic quality and underinvesting in technology for decades. And as though its cash cow wasn't stolen by a website published by one dude, using pine. PINE!

Yes, a command-line email shell is a terrifying piece of technology to be up against. Such a FIERCE STORM!

Anyway, here are some other business jerks, other than Sam Zell, who have recently bitched about their own little perfect storms:

• Rick Wagoner, GM CEO. "Higher gas prices affected the sales of profitable SUVs, some aging models, higher raw-material costs, the bankruptcy of some suppliers... we got hit with the perfect storm." Ha ha right, who would have seen higher gas prices coming, except maybe someone who was alive in the late 1970s and remembered how GM got rolled by Honda and Toyota; or in the mid-1980s, when GM started Saturn to compete in the small car market.
• Angelo Mozilo, CEO of mortgage-finance trainwreck Countrywide: "Mozilo [said] that we are seeing the makings of the 'perfect storm.' The bottom line is, as values decrease, the options for borrowers, homebuyers, the combination of limiting their product available to them is exacerbating the problem." Right, when you are running the most insanely aggressive subprime mortgage factory on the planet, any decline whatsoever in home prices looks like a terrible, "perfect" storm, instead of a bubble burst that had been predicted for something like four years running by everyone else.
• BusinessWeek called the panic of '08 "Wall Street's Perfect Storm," because who on Earth could have foreseen problems lending money you don't have to people who can't pay it back for reason's you can't explain? Cheap credit was supposed to continue forever, and the downside of risk was never supposed to manifest.
  
• Now we all get to blame our wrecked economy on the weather, instead of collective recklessness. A "preeminent foreign affairs analyst" told CNN we're in "a perfect storm. We have a collapsing housing market, weak consumer spending and a credit crisis."

The phrase just won't die. A university called for it to be banned in January. Just last week, Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post made basically the same points I'm making now. And yet it keeps coming.

There is some small consolation in the fact that the phrase instantly flags to the listener/reader that a weak, lazy argument is probably being made, and that the phrase can be safely translated as "proximate symptoms of some root ineptitude." That right there is a perfect reform! (Not really.)

• Barack Obama. Blago wanted to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder.
• Rahm Emanuel Obama's incoming chief of staff was the one Blago wanted to negotiate with—he hoped to get stuff from Rahm in exchange for picking Obama's preferred candidate. Also Rahm maybe alerted the feds!
• Tony Rezko This Chicago fundraiser and felon raised a fortune for Blago, and a smaller fortune for Obama back in the day. From Blago he got plum appointments for associates and friends, and lord knows what else.
• Sam Zell Blago was unhappy with the Chicago Tribune's coverage of how corrupt he was, so he told the owner of their parent company, Zell, to make them cut it out. Zell, who needed the state's help to unload the Chicago Cubs, allegedly agreed to look into it. Zell also connects us to Lee Abrams! Abrams is Zell's friend and Tribune Co's insane "Chief Innovation Officer." He will hopefully have a crazy memo about this soon.
• John McCormick This is the Tribune editor who was mean to Blago all the time. Supposedly Zell agreed to have him "restructured" out of his job in exchange for state help with Tribune's bankruptcy, but this didn't actually happen.
• Patrick Fitzgerald the dreamboat US Attorney who's bringing Blago down is known as a tenacious prosecutor, and he was already famous for his role investigating Plamegate, the weird old scandal in which Bush administration officials leaked the name of a covert CIA operative to journalists to damager her husband's credibility. That scandal, as we all remember, ended up with Times reporter and terrible hack Judy Miller going to jail rather than revealing to Fitzgerald that her source was Scooter Libby, even though Libby had already given her permission to reveal this.
• Jesse Jackson Jr. It's sill possible that "Senate Candidate 5" is Jesse Jackson, Jr. Even if he isn't, he's a family friend of the Obamas (specifically his childhood friend Michelle) who is seen by many as a front-runner for Obama's vacant seat. So Blago would obviously have been in contact with him regarding the seat, and what Blago wanted in exchange for giving it to him. Meanwhile Jackson's brother Yusef was an investor in a magazine called Radar with pervy billionaire friend-of-Clinton Ron Burkle!
• Also Jesse Jackson Sr was on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as was Kelly Preson, who was in Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon!

The editor of the Chicago Tribune has released a statement about the Blagojevich case, but all it says is that the paper may have held some reporting at the request of the US attorney. It says nothing about the allegations that Zell told Blago through an intermediary that he "got the message and is very sensitive to the issue," and indicated he'd be willing to fire a journalist critical of the governor so that a state deal to save the Tribune $100 million on the Chicago Cubs would be safe.

However! That editor, John McCormick, apparently wasn't fired, and is still employed by the Chicago Tribune. The real question is whether Blago somehow delayed the company from selling the Cubs—its most salable asset—enough to force it into bankruptcy.

Highly doubtful. Blago only hinted there might be trouble with the state deal. And remember that this all took place just last month. The Tribune has been heading towards bankruptcy much longer than that. Also remember that the Cubs were left out of the company's bankruptcy filing, so their plan to sell the team is probably moving ahead as normal.

No, mostly this Blago thing just makes Sam Zell look like an alleged scumbag.

From the company's letter to advertisers:

8. Why should advertising clients continue advertising with Tribune?
Tribune is not going out of business. In fact, the company took this step to take control of its business and ensure it’s viable for many years to come. The company’s brands remain strong—we’re still publishing our newspapers and operating our TV stations and websites. Tribune values its relationships with advertisers and looks forward to continuing to work with them.
9. How long will the reorganization process take?
This process can last varying amounts of time.

Okay! And to employees, Zell says: just keep on working:

By restructuring our debt, we will reduce the pressure on the company’s operating businesses, enabling us to pursue our vision of creating a sustainable, cutting-edge media company that is valued by our readers, viewers, and advertisers, and that plays a vital role in the communities we serve. This filing should not impact the way you do your jobs on a day-to-day basis.

Until they are gone. [Pic via]

From the press release:

The company will continue to operate its media businesses during the restructuring, including publishing its newspapers and running its television stations and interactive properties without interruption, and has sufficient cash to do so.
The Chicago Cubs franchise, including Wrigley Field, is not included in the Chapter 11 filing. Efforts to monetize the Cubs and its related assets will continue.

The LAT says the company has $300 million cash, which is enough for the short term but not for the long term. Zell told employees that their health care and 401k plans would not be affected.

Zell's Tribune buyout may go down as the worst media purchase of the decade. Sorry, guys. At least you still have time to sell the Cubs. [LAT; pic via]

Except instead of a house it's a giant newspaper company, and thousands of journalists at the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Florida Sun-Sentinel and other papers stand to lose their jobs. Apparently Tribune's insane newspaper savior Lee Abrams is going to have to send even more rambling and pointess memos to get them and their advertisers out of the  "fear/acceptance zone."

Bloomberg predicted all this, as usual, by listening to fancypants Wall Street analysts, with their attention to things like fiscal solvency and balance sheets and other things of zero interest to new media visionaries like Zell and Abrams.

Tribune paid off some debt by selling Newsday to Cablevision for $632 million. But it still needs more cash to avoid going into default, and several of its big ideas look dubious amid the economic meltdown: selling the Chicago Cubs (S&P is skeptical and Tribune delayed the sale , originally to come by the end of the year, until spring), issuing securities on the moribund commercial paper market and selling the properties now housing the LA Times and Chicago Trib (commercial real estate is in the toilet).

Driving this whole firesale mentality are continued declines in newspaper advertising, which Zell apparently didn't count on, and which radio-industry clown Abrams couldn't correct. Operating profits declined 83 percent companywide in the most recent quarter, according to the Journal.

Tribune's best hope at this point is that its lenders will decide the company is in better shape than most other distressed debtors and give it some breathing room, rather than lose all their money in bankruptcy. The lenders have supposedly been "amicable" with Tribune thus far, according to the WSJ, but demoralized empoyees won't be so forgiving the next time Zell comes around to cuss them out.

UPDATE: Leverage with creditors might be precisely the point, actually. Writes the Times this morning: " Analysts and bankruptcy experts say that the hiring of advisers, including Lazard and Sidley Austin, one of the company’s longtime law firms, could be a just-in-case move, or a bargaining tactic" (emphasis added). On the other hand: "As the economy weakens, other lenders have become more aggressive about forcing debtors into bankruptcy when they believe such a move is inevitable, to preserve a company’s valuable cash reserves."

SAM: I haven't figured out how to cash in a Pulitzer Prize. There was a day when a newspaper put "Winner of Pulitzer Prize" on the front page, and people flocked to read the Pulitzer Prize story. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that that's the case today But I also think that there are scale issues. In other words, I think that if the goal is a Pulitzer, it's in the wrong place. In other words, we're not in the business of, in effect, underwriting writers for the future. We're a business that, in effect, has a bottom line. So as far as we're concerned, I think Pulitzers are terrific, but Pulitzers should be the cream on the top of the coffee. They shouldn't be the grounds. And I think there are a lot of scenarios in the newspaper industry where the entire focus is on Pulitzers. The entire focus is on becoming an international correspondent. I mean, I know that because our newspaper sent somebody to Kabul to cover the "Afghan Idol Show." Now, I know Idol is the No. 1 TV program in the world, but do my readers really want a firsthand report on what this broad looked like who won the "Afghan Idol" Show"? Is that news?

Haha, not sure what that "broad" bit was about, but otherwise, Sam, you are correct! This is just like the final season of The Wire, where the asshole editor chases Pulitzers at the expense of real local news. And you know everything on The Wire is gospel! Perhaps NYT boss Pinch Sulzberger should take Zell's advice, too:

As of last night, the entire market cap of the New York Times [Co.] was $1.2 billion. And my question to Arthur, who I think is out here someplace, is if you want to be a charitable trust, be a charitable trust. If you don't want to be a charitable trust, then you've got to focus on producing a return for investors' capital, and it's just that simple. It worked in the old days because you could be a public trust and you could do well for your shareholders because you had a monopoly, and monopolies are wonderful. I mean, I think competition is terrific, particularly for all those guys out there. Me? I like monopolies. I'm just sorry I waited 60 years to get into the newspaper industry because the 40 I missed were great.

Well by god, this gnomish asshole CEO of a debt-ridden company just summed things up once and for all. Listen to him, Pinch. (Although you may also want to note that the reason papers like the LA Times can't afford to do Pulitzer-bait investigative stories any more is because Zell has cut staff to the bone.) [Portfolio]

[The ridiculous postscript to this interview: as soon as Lipman went to the audience for questions, in came Jeff Jarvis (or is it Jim? Always get them confused) to complain about online persecution of himself. Read this, then consider this:

Hi, Jim [sic] Jarvis. Mr. Zell, first, I may speak for others here when I say I wish you would do this more often and talk publicly more often. It's great fun. I'm a journalist, and I got attacked in Salon this morning…or Slate this morning—I get them confused—for holding journalists responsible for the fate of journalists.

Meh.]

"In Los Angeles media circles the legend is told that in the 1980s, the Los Angeles Times was so fat with news, feature stories and ads that a paper thrown on the porch of actress Barbara Bain landed on—and killed—her dog. (As the Herald Examiner gleefully reported at the time.) That was then. Now the paper is featherweight..."

Nowadays it's only big enough to kill their gnomish CEO Sam Zell, if thrown hard enough.

But they're not the only newspaper to shrink: check out the Guardian, downsized in 2005. The old broadsheet version was definitely dog-killing size:
[via Matthew Hunt]

And look at tiny little Rolling Stone, the AP points out today. Could it have killed a dog, L.A. Times-style, in its bigger days? Probably not.

See that, employees? He spent all his money hiring The Eagles, so take your lawsuit and go to hell. [via Philly City Paper]

"The lawsuit filed yesterday is filled with frivolous and unfounded allegations, and I hope every partner in this company is as outraged as I am at having to spend the time and money required to defend ourselves against it. The media industry is in crisis, the advertising environment is extremely difficult and the economy is in turmoil. The overwhelming majority of our employees have taken up the challenge — they are working hard, leading by example, and devoting themselves to re-inventing our businesses by developing new and innovative products for our readers, viewers and advertisers. As a company we are attacking our problems and revolutionizing the media industry.

"This lawsuit is a mere distraction, and we will work quickly to see that
it is dismissed. It will not deter us from completing the work ahead."