Last December, Sam Zell, Chairman of the Tribune Company, seemed confident of his situation when he bought the Tribune Company for 8.3 billion dollars . According to The Wall Street Journal, the Tribune Co. is now 12.9 billion dollars in debt with listed assets of 7.6 billion dollars, not including the Chicago Cubs. Zell hopes to sell the Cubs soon in order to gain some much needed money. Buyer
s, however, are hard to find in these tough economic times. The economy as well as the internet has played a major role in the downfall of newspapers. The Wall Street Journal reports that newspaper companies have been steadily losing money due to the availability of news online. Bloomberg News, a highly acclaimed news source, reports that Zell originally bought the Tribune Co. because he was “sick and tired of everybody talking about and commiserating about the end of newspapers.” Sam Zell has recently been forced to cut jobs and redesign The Chicago Tribune to make it smaller and cheaper to produce. Despite filing for bankruptcy, Zell is reassuring his employees, "We're doing everything we can to get from here to there. Our employees are not the reason our revenue is down the way it is" (The Wall Street Journal).Zell has done the right thing by filing for bankruptcy.I don't believe his acquisition of the Tribune Co. attributed to its current financial state. The company, in general, has been in trouble for many years. Bloggers on the Law Blog at WSJ.com feel similarly to me. One blogger points out that the Tribune Co. did not have many other "attractive" buyers at the time Sam Zell bought the company. Another Blogger feels that without Zell, less jobs would be lost and less debt would be accumulated; but admits that the Tribune Co. would not be "fourishing" without Zell.
Below is a map of the wide territory the Tribune Company covers through its newspapers and television stations as of September 2008.
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