Sam Zell is the gnomish CEO of Tribune, a company with a bunch of nosediving newspapers and one valuable parking lot. Luckily the Tribune Co. is owned by the happy employees themselves, leaving Zell with enough liquidity to throw himself huge, circus-like birthday parties. Did you miss your invite for his last one?…
Gnomish Tribune CEO Sam Zell has finally deigned to respond to the fact that his own current and former employees at the LA Times filed a lawsuit against him two days ago for, essentially, making Tribune suck. We imagine Zell spent a full day throwing things around his office and carving "F.U!" in his desk with a pen…
Gnomish asshole Tribune owner Sam Zell is getting sued. By his own (current and former) employees! They filed a class action suit in LA today charging that "Zell's illegal and irresponsible actions and public statements have damaged the reputation and business of the company." Which is legalese for "You made all the…
♦ NBC's Ben Silverman says he hasn't managed the "unrelenting press attention" as well as he could have, and he's doing better than most people assme, a sentiment echoed by his close pal, Donny Deutsch. [TVDecoder]
♦ Harbinger's Phil Falcone says he has no plans to dump his investment in the New York Times. [Reuters
Newspaper publisher Tribune is now saying that timing was what put a link to a four-year old United Airlines bankruptcy story on the website of one of its papers. From there, it was indexed by Google and made its way onto the Bloomberg business wire, triggering a partially automated market selloff which crashed…
One sad milestone in a business' decline is when they come to find that the real estate they hold-once incidental-has become more valuable than the actual business conducted on the real estate. Wall Street firms collapse and sell their towering headquarters for liquidity. Nobody wants to eat at Ruby Tuesdays any more,…
Cox Enterprises announced today that the Austin American-Statesman is up for sale, along with 28 smaller papers across several states. This comes just after the Daytona Beach News-Journal was put up for sale, and the NJ Star-Ledger and Trenton Times have been threatened to be sold, and Dow Jones couldn't even sell the…
Gnomish, Harley-riding media Methuselah and Tribune Co. boss Sam Zell inspires a bit of resentment amongst his minions, mainly for doing things like laying them all off while cussing them out. But his ex-Tribune employees are now striking back-on a blog! Prepare to be hoisted on the new media petard of broke, grizzled…
Ann Marie Lipinski, who went from summer intern to editor of the Chicago Tribune, is stepping down. Why? She won't really say! Except that "this position is not the fit it once was." Which is to say, not the position it was from 2001 until crazy billionaire Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company in 2007? Maybe? "Her…
"I don't want to die. I love what I'm doing," said Viacom chief Sumner Redstone on CNBC yesterday. My, what a positive and also extremely sad quote! Coming from an old, old man like Redstone, it's more of a last-ditch prayer to Father Time than a peppy statement of on-the-job satisfaction. After the jump, a complete…
There was much consternation in the media world earlier this week when it emerged that Tribune's Los Angeles Times would take its Sunday magazine out of the hands of trained journalists and hand control over to the newspaper's sales staff. Editor Russ Stanton even insisted that the magazine's name be changed so…
"Scott C. Smith is stepping down as publisher of The Chicago Tribune and president of Tribune Publishing as part of changes being made by Samuel Zell." [Times]
Whoa. We all know the Tribune Company and its biggest paper, the LA Times, are in trouble. But this seems drastic even for them: the paper is considering a plan to fire the entire editorial staff of its Sunday magazine, and turn the whole operation over to the business side of the paper. It would no longer even be…
Sam Zell's Tribune Company is making drastic cuts in news pages, and adding more colorful charts and graphs. Analyst Ken Doctor says that strategy is doomed to fail, since it just weakens papers' brands further, and charticles haven't impressed anyone since the early heyday of USA Today. "People and paper" are…
Tribune CEO Sam Zell famously cursed one of his journalists earlier this year when asked whether refocusing the company would undermine serious journalism. He called such thinking "classic... journalistic arrogance." But now Zell is struggling to service $12.8 billion in debt amid a weak economy, and he's planning…
At left is the top of an interview with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez filed by Charlotte Hall, Editor of the Orlando Sentinel and President of the American Society Of Newspaper Editors. Other editors who recently accompanied Hall to Venezuela, like Marty Baron of the Boston Globe and Margaret Sullivan of the …
Each time Sam Zell's Tribune Company lays off journalists, puts a title on the block and bemoans the economics of news publishing, his ebullient new innovation czar ups the change rhetoric. Lee Abrams' latest memo, after a visit to Zell's Los Angeles Times, takes incoherent optimism to the level of prose poetry. "BE…
Word emerged Tuesday on Rupert Murdoch's handshake deal to buy Newsday, and there was talk about Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman dropping out of the bidding for the Long Island tabloid. But the Times today said Zuckerman is expected to make a counteroffer next week, while Jared Kushner's Observer Media Group may…
