Posted on 11/09/2006 4:39:07 AM PST by abb
Two of the Southland's wealthiest residents made a bid for one of the nation's largest media companies Wednesday in an attempt to restore local ownership of the Los Angeles Times.
Billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and Ron Burkle, who made his fortune in the supermarket industry, submitted an offer for Chicago-based Tribune Co. In addition to The Times, Tribune owns KTLA Channel 5, three dozen other newspapers and television stations and baseball's Chicago Cubs.
The pair would not disclose details of their offer, which was made through companies they control. The bid was "competitive" with at least four offers made for Tribune last week, said a person who was familiar with the proposal but not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Broad and Burkle have repeatedly expressed interest in owning their hometown paper. Their main goal: reestablish local ownership of The Times, which has lost two publishers and two editors in as many years in battles with Tribune over staff cuts.
The company has been under pressure from its shareholders, including the Chandler family of California, to substantially increase its sagging stock price through a sale of all or some of its holdings.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
"There was a land of Publishers and Editors called the Newspaper Business... Here in this pretty world Journalism took its last bow... Here was the last ever to be seen of Reporters and their Enablers, of Anonymous Sources and of Stringers... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization Gone With the Wind..."
With apologies to Margaret Mitchell...
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-moguls9nov09,1,1639755,full.story?coll=la-headlines-business
Unlikely pair of bidders
Eli Broad and Ron Burkle won't want to run The Times together, acquaintances say. Neither has a background in newspapers.
By Kim Christensen, Robin Abcarian and Christopher Reynolds
Times Staff Writers
November 9, 2006
Eli Broad made his fortune building affordable homes for Southern Californians, while Ron Burkle made his by filling their pantries with groceries.
On Wednesday, they joined in a bid to buy the Los Angeles Times' parent, Tribune Co. If successful, the two billionaires with no newspaper experience might pull off one of their most audacious deals yet.
Broad and Burkle have spent millions cutting separate swaths across the landscape of Southern California arts, culture and philanthropy. Their bid is likely to be countered by another local billionaire, David Geffen, who is expected to make a separate offer for the newspaper.
Like Geffen, who made his fortune in music and movies, Broad and Burkle have egos to match their accomplishments. Some who know them question whether they could work well together as partners, prompting speculation they would divvy Tribune's holdings of newspapers, broadcast outlets and the Chicago Cubs baseball team.
"The obvious question on everyone's mind is where does the L.A. Times end up in all this? In whose hands and under whose direction?" said Steve Soboroff, president of Playa Vista, a former Los Angeles mayoral candidate and one of 20 community leaders who in September wrote to Tribune Co. protesting its plans for cutbacks at The Times. "There are all kinds of possibilities."
Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who is an acquaintance of Burkle's and hikes with Broad in the Santa Monica Mountains almost every Sunday, said he was not surprised to hear about the pair's proposal.
Buying Tribune would be "an interesting game," said Riordan, a multimillionaire venture capitalist who restructured Mattel Co. before going into politics.
Ping
We may think LA Times is a left-wing publication now. However, we ain't seen nuthin' to compare with what it would become with Geffen as owner.
Which will hasten its death even more swiftly...
(New York) Times Rolls Over for Burkle
How a Billionaire Friend of Bill Helps Him Do Good, and Well (Ron Burkle and Yucaipa Companies)
Ralphs Indicted On Federal Charges (Dem. Ron Burkle)
L.A. billionaire's wife: Burkle spied (Clinton's business partner )
Burkle's big friends with Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson.
If he's got $4.6 billion to lose, then it may not happen "swiftly."
Geffin has always been about consolidating and promoting talent. The future of the news business isn't paper and ink, it is content.
As we used to say: Content is King!
He'll still put out a paper, but his primary focus will be to create his own private editorial "label" staffed by krugman, Friedman, and MoDo types distributed over the internet.
Anyone with experience in the print media knows that less than 20% of expenses go into content. The rest is all plant, production, and overhead that adds no value to the product.
Here's what my tea-leaves read: Geffin will recruit old-media "stars" into a content focused, digitally distributed, Pajamas Media-style model.
There is one major flaw, however, it is nearly impossible to build a start-up staffed by prima donnas.
dung.
L.A. Billionaires Join in Bidding For Tribune Co.
By SARAH ELLISON, RHONDA L. RUNDLE and BRIAN STEINBERG
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 9, 2006 12:04 a.m.; Page B1
Los Angeles billionaires Eli Broad and Ronald Burkle, once thought to be interested only in buying the Los Angeles Times, have joined forces to make a preliminary bid for the paper's parent, Tribune Co., heating up the competition for its stable of newspapers and television stations.
Mr. Broad, whose wealth comes from home building and insurance, and Mr. Burkle, an investor who made his fortune in supermarkets, join several private-equity groups that submitted preliminary offers last week. Messrs. Burkle and Broad are thought to be primarily interested in the Los Angeles Times, Tribune's biggest newspaper and one that is thought to be worth at least $2 billion. Bidding for the entire company, while likely costing four times as much, may give them an edge over rivals also interested in the paper, such as entertainment mogul David Geffen.
News of the preliminary bid added to an unfolding drama at the Los Angeles Times, which is becoming a symbol of the turmoil gripping the newspaper industry. Falling circulation and ad revenue and stinging competition from the Internet are putting pressure on publishers to take dramatic action, including job cuts or bigger corporate restructurings. The Broad-Burkle bid for Tribune came the day after the Times's editor, Dean Baquet, quit after refusing to make job cuts demanded by Tribune management.
While the staff of the Los Angeles Times generally supports the idea of local ownership of the paper, they have no role in the sale process. Mr. Geffen hasn't been in contact with Mr. Baquet, but has had some casual conversations with at least one top editor at the paper, according to people familiar with the matter.
The bid came the same day that the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper bought by private local owners earlier this year, resigned amid continuing financial pressure. (Also, Morgan Stanley continued to pressure New York Times Co. to abolish a stock structure that leaves the paper in control of the Sulzberger family; see article2.)
Tribune, under pressure from its largest shareholder, the Chandler family, said in September that it would explore options, including a sale of the entire company. Tribune owns 11 newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, as well as 25 TV stations and the Chicago Cubs.
Advice to the Trib shareholders -- take their money and run.
Media ping :)
Typhoons lose $$ too.
Thanks for the excellent documentation re Burkle and the other rat billionaires.
WOW. Thanks for the pimg.
Mo will save the links :)
saved .. let's up I'll remember where I saved it
LOL -- precisely the reason I don't save anything.
Q&A: L.A. Times Editor Exits
A day after the editor of the L.A. Times was forced out, two billionaires team up with a Tribune bid.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Andrew Murr
Newsweek
Updated: 5:50 p.m. CT Nov 8, 2006
Nov. 8, 2006 - After only 18 months in charge of the nation’s fourth largest daily newspaper, Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet was forced to resign on Tuesday. For months he’d publicly resisted making staff cuts that the paper’s owner, the Chicago-based Tribune Co., demanded as part of an effort to downsize and consolidate resources to reverse a declining stock price. No one has covered the Times’s troubles more closely than Kevin Roderick, a former Times reporter who now edits LA Observed (www.laobserved.com), a Web site covering media and culture. He talked to Newsweek’s Andrew Murr. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What led to Baquet’s departure?
KEVIN RODERICK: A couple of months ago, the Tribune company told Baquet that they wanted him to execute more budget cuts and he refused. The publisher, Jeffrey Johnson, also refused. Within a couple of weeks, Johnson was out the door. A new publisher, David Hiller, was appointed from the Chicago Tribune. He made public announcements saying that he would take some time and see how he and Baquet got along. Clearly, they didn’t get along very well.
Baquet made a speech in New Orleans last month that may have gotten him in trouble.
He talked tough and urged editors to be feisty to their publishers and corporate officers. This came as he and Hiller were feeling each other out. Hiller said yesterday that it had something to do with his decision to ask Baquet to resign.
How did staffers react to Baquet’s announcement?
The newsroom is devastated. Baquet had only been the editor for 18 months, but he’d been the managing editor for four-plus years before that. He was very popular. And more than that, he was seen as the last hope of protecting the L.A. Times from the culture war of the Tribune Company, which doesn’t like Los Angeles and doesn’t like the people at the Los Angeles Times. He was seen as this absolute paragon of principle.
Baquet’s departure stimulated an offer for the Tribune Company Wednesday by two locals.
News broke [on the Times’s Web site] that [supermarket magnate] Ron Burkle and [homebuilding mogul] Eli Broad have teamed up on an offer to buy the entire Tribune company. The interesting thing is that Broad and Burkle made an offer together. Until now, they had been assumed to be operating separately. That, to me, indicates a certain level of seriousness. No price was disclosed.
Might any other locals make an offer for the paper?
We know that David Geffen is actively sniffing around, trying to put together a deal. Geffen has talked about accepting a lower profit margin at the paper. The Tribune has insisted on raising the profit margin [above the current 20 percent].
One report about staff cuts said the newsroom may lose 50 to 75 positions. Hiller seems to be saying that might not happen.
Hiller tried to soothe the newsroom yesterday, saying there would be no more cuts this year. But the implication was that there would be cuts next year. But really, it’s more than that. Hiller has made an announcement that he wants to reorient the paper away from its ambitions in foreign and national reporting and give it more of an emphasis of a local paper. The model he’s got for that, we all assume, is the Chicago Tribune. It’s not the high-achieving paper that the L.A. Times is. It doesn’t have a lot of foreign bureaus or national bureaus. It’s always seemed that’s the model the Tribune Company wants. It didn’t want the big, blue-chip newspaper like the L.A. Times when it bought it six years ago. That seems to be what this is about. They had a fundamental disagreement about the direction of the L.A. Times.
Circulation has dropped 25 percent since 2000, when Tribune bought the paper. In making it more local, what can readers expect?
It’s hard to know. During the time the Tribune has owned the Times, they have ruthlessly reduced the amount of resources devoted to local coverage. They have eliminated entire editions and sections and have cut by hundreds the number of people devoted to what you might call hyperlocal coverage. The reason they did that was it’s very expensive to generate local coverage. It’s hard to see Tribune going back into that.
What do you know about the new editor, Jim O’Shea?
He’s the managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. He’s kind of from the old school. You could argue that Baquet was not the guy to reinvent what the paper of the 21st century should look like. You’d say the same about O’Shea. He’s a journalist’s journalist. He’s always covered news. He’s a big supporter of investigative reporting. Whether he’s going to have the creativity to invent a new L.A. Times isn’t clear. Whether he’ll be able to stand up the publisher is another thing. I think David Hiller will be the man calling the shots. The appointment is reassuring because O’Shea is such a solid journalist. But it’s also a bit of an insult since the last two L.A. Times editors were major players in national journalism and O’Shea was passed over a few years ago for the No. 1 job at the Tribune.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15628423/site/newsweek/
I think that we will see elite billionaire rats buying dinosaur fishwraps and local tv stations across the country.
Then, they will get Pelosi and her thugs to make their new properties, an endangered national treasure/species. They will pass laws making it safe for them to lie and to have imaginary sources for their news. Also, they will be wanting our tax %'s. By 2010, there will be no Free Republic or viable conservative blog sites.
Then, they will get the unions across the country to help finance their fishwraps.
Retirement funds, mutual funds, and pension funds will be treated as open bank doors to finance their left wing PR machines.
The internet will become a target of left wingers like Pelosi, Kennedy, Durbin, Murtha, Clintoon, Reid and others. They know the internet is the only vehicle for truth, and they will find ways to muzzle it if not destroy it.
The above will be more gifts from those bsers, who have said "Losing to the Rats is wonderful"!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.