Trib to be "AP Free" Next Week

Not excuses. People pay for the Wall Street Journal because the information helps them make money. Figure out a way that people can profit from City Council meeting and high school volleyball stories, and then you can make a comparison to the WSJ's model. Otherwise, apples and stock markets. It's not a coincidence that NO OTHER MAJOR PAPER has sustained a paywall and that only a few small papers do so now.

 

??????????

Our once-shareholder-driven paper began its greatest days in the early 80s. Hiring. Growing. Traveling. Sports section space rivaled ONLY by the Dallas Morning News. Three separate sports sections on Sundays in October 1997 (World Series, College Football and Sports).

Only about 2003-04 did the gutting begin.

You can't fight "Free!"

Sometimes it's not anybody's "fault."

Newspapers didn't think of craigslist?

Well, neither did you. And neither did anybody but craig. Not being a one-in-a-billion visionary is not a character flaw nor a reason for scorn.

 

You're deluding yourself. Newspapers started in their downward spiral in the 1980s when they got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to satisfy shareholders with obscene margins. They hired younger, less expensive and less experienced people, they formed JOAs to kill competition, and they broke unions at every turn.

The Tribune Co. was an industry leader in these areas. Moving to the Web, not so much.

 

I'm a 24-year Trib company veteran who saw first-hand all the expansion we did in the 80s and 90s.

I'm deluding myself because I saw a sports department grow from 37 (1986) to 52 by the end of the 90s?

 

Again, I'm not talking about agate or staff fluctuation in the damn sports department. The Tribune Co. has been a driving force in the newspapers industry's downward spiral since it went public in 1983. Since then, it's been all about the shareholders and greed. They led the industry in union busting and they destroyed all of the great Times-Mirror properties (LA Times Hartford Courant) they acquired in their spree of leveraged mergers.

 

What it's done since going private is 100x worse than anything it did while public.

A few years ago --- a decade and a half after 1983 --- it was THE newspaper chain you wanted to work for.

 

No, it wasn't. I'd have quit the business before working for Tribune Co. It was leveraged over its head, busting unions and destroying the newspapers it acquired by the mid-'90s. Go look up the Nashville law firm King & Ballow and read some of its glorious history with the Tribune Co. -- the company that introduced these scumbags to the newspaper industry. (Tribune Co. also helped introduce King & Ballow to baseball when baseball forced a strike in '94, too.) The Tribune Co. was already in huge financial trouble when it went private again. It was too late.

 

It makes it easy to make points and conclusions when you yell from both sides of the fence.
First off, The Chandlers abhorred unions, too. That was long before the Tribune bought Times Mirror in 2000. That is when Tribune became leveraged.
Pinning the fall of humanity seems a bit exaggerated.

 

So?

And Time-Mirror was hardly Tribune Co.'s first highly leveraged merger. I don't recall them paying cash for the Cubs in '81 or when they bought KTLA-TV in Los Angeles for $510 million in 1985, for that matter. Like Murdoch, Tribune Co. went on a spree as federal cross-ownership regulations were loosened in the '80s and '90s.

 

Bought for $20.5 million. Sold 95 percent of it for $845 million.

This is somehow . . . bad business?

Criminy, if their purchase of the Cubs was leveraged, so is just about every mortgage.

 

Who said it was bad business? Investors love a big turnaround. The fact remains that between the time they bought and the time they sold they had to service a ton of debt for dozens of acquisitions that they made during that period. And one of the main ways that Tribune Co. (and most other companies playing the leveraged merger game of the '80s and '90s) was to reduce costs gut properties it acquired. Good for the investors isn't necessarily good for the product itself.

 

I absolutely agree with that. No qualms at all.
We've seen it industry-wide. Seen in corporate-wide. Input a department store chain or the automotive industry or arms of the real estate industry and you have similar failures.