The Koch brothers, billionaire funders of the Tea Party and libertarian all-stars, are reportedly interested in buying several newspapers across the country, including the The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, and The Orlando Sentinel. They might also be exploring the possibility of buying Hoy…
What would you do if you were in charge of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune? Would you offer a waitress $100 to show her breasts? That's what Tribune Company CEO Randy Michaels did. And it's not all.
As of June 13, the 85-year-old Depression-era comic strip will no longer be syndicated in newspapers by broke ass Tribune Media Services. The company will instead focus on rebranding Annie for the Age of the iPad. [AP, pic]
In your surrogate Friday media column: Anderson Cooper tries on a studio audience, magazine ads continue to plummet, Crazy Rupert Murdoch has dealzzzz, Oprah buries Kitty Kelly's tell-all, and New York's most loathsome bromantic couple launch a "media scene" lunchspot.
The Los Angeles Times is losing its online managing editor to CNN.com, editor Russ Stanton confirmed in a staff email, reprinted below. The departure marks the further dismantling of a team that relaunched the site starting about five years ago.
The fake front page story in Thursday's Los Angeles Times was a PR disaster; staffers are signing a petition calling it "embarrassing and demoralizing." Naturally, then, management is planning a sequel.
Wiretap transcripts yesterday indicated that Tribune Company honcho Sam Zell might have subtly conveyed (wink-wink) that he might just have to restructure (wink wink) one or more bothersome Chicago Trib editorial writers out of their jobs in response to demands from Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who was delaying…
Usually the arrest of a corrupt Chicago politician would afford, at best, a paragraph of coverage here at Gawker. It's Dog-bites-man news. But Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is a magical figure, who is connected, directly and indirectly, with so many beloved Gawker characters. Steve Dressler put together this…
You want your Chicago-style politics? They don't come much more Chicago-style than this: Democratic Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was just arrested, along with his chief of staff, by FBI agents. How many corrupt things can one Governor do before a new ethics law takes effect at the beginning of next year?…
A little late, no? The Pulitzer Prize, conventional journalism's most sought-after award, is opening its doors to Web publications, eleven years after Internet reporters first tried to submit their work.
Sam Zell's Tribune Company is exploring a bankruptcy filing, the Wall Street Journal and Times are reporting. Profits have fallen faster than the media conglomerate can sell off assets, leaving the company in likely violation of debt covenants and scrounging to pay nearly $1 billion in interest. Of course, nearly…
As recently as the mid-1980s, the newspapers that ostensibly own the Associated Press constituted 50 percent of its revenue. Over the past decade, with the explosion of syndicated news on wesbites and the proliferation of cable news channel, cashflows have come increasingly from new media customers, who tend to favor…
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…
As errors continue to mount at Bloomberg News, the question isn't just whose heads will roll, but from how high up on the org chart. The financial newswire avoided cratering Apple Inc stock with its premature Steve Jobs obituary last month because markets had been closed for half an hour by the time the false item was…
Could the editors at the Los Angeles Times be any more useless? Their newspaper is going down in flames, with cash flow declines ranked worst among the deeply troubled Tribune Company newspapers. Their best hope for salvation is the Web, where the paper is desperately behind upstart competitors like Nikki Finke's …
There are supposed to be 15,000 journalists covering the Democratic Convention in Denver, a good proportion at newspapers. But the time-pressed and laptop-lugging reporters have largely abandoned their own medium, print: the New York Observer's John Koblin snapped this neglected pile of newspapers yesterday afternoon…
Look! Those Gossip Girl ads the whole world is talking about (or at least the part of the world that lives in New York and probably "curates" a "linklog" or something) made the front page of am New York, a free tabloid daily owned by Tribune Co. You know what's funny? Gossip Girl airs on the CW, the network most…
To pimp its sugary, 200-calorie iced coffees, fast food giant McDonald's offered to pay some local TV newscasts for product placement. And of course the newscasts went for it, since local TV journalism is where ethical standards go to die. Meredith Corporation is putting the drinks in front of anchors at the Fox…
"Orlando is a proving ground for Sam Zell's effort to reinvent
floundering Tribune Co., owner of a string of television stations and
newspapers, including the Sentinel, the Chicago Tribune and
the Los Angeles Times." [WSJ]
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…
