Zell Wins Tribune Co. Bidding Battle

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Posted on Apr 2, 2007

chicagobusiness.com

After meeting well into the night Sunday, the Tribune Co. board of directors agreed to sell the company to Chicago-based billionaire Sam Zell for an estimated $8.2 billion.  According to the Los Angeles Times, Zell’s bid trumped last-minute offers from L.A. moguls Ron Burkle and Eli Broad.

L.A. Times

Billionaire real estate mogul Sam Zell has reached an agreement to buy Tribune Co.—owner of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, KTLA-TV Channel 5 and the Chicago Cubs baseball team—a source with knowledge of the deal said this morning.

The deal, probably worth close to $8 billion not including Tribune’s nearly $5 billion of existing debt, would put a 65-year-old entrepreneur famed for turning around troubled properties at the helm of the nation’s third largest newspaper chain and one of its largest conglomerations of television stations.

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TAGS: chicago cubs eli broad ron burkle sam zell tribune co.

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By Ernest Canning, April 2, 2007 at 10:20 pm Link to this comment
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While it remains to be seen just where Zell stands on the topic of journalism that speaks truth to power, it is clear that things could not get worse at the Los Angeles Times then they have been under the Tribune Company’s disasterous ownership, which has demoralized the Times’s staff and reduced a once formidable source of news to a print version of cable.  If Zell wants to undue the damage, he should start either by asking Rober Scheer to return to the paper’s editorial page or by selling the paper to Eli Broad.

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