Friday, January 26, 2007

The Pieces of Tribune Company

As a native Iowan I grew up watching the Iowa Cubs (AAA farm club of the Chicago Cubs) and the Chicago Cubs so the recent news about the Tribune Company's future is of personal interest to you.

The Financial Times (FT) reported this week that the Tribune Company appears headed for extinction since it has numerous bidders for its collection of assets including:

Chandler family and News Corp -- focused on the newspaper assets especially Newsday which News Corp would like to combine with the back office operations of its New York Post newspaper to reduce operating expenses.

Carlyle Group -- is interested in buying Tribune's television stations

David Geffen -- this co-founder of SKG Dreamworks wanted to buy Tribune's Los Angeles Times

No where in this FT article were the Tribune's Chicago Cubs mentioned -- one of my most storied baseball teams in America. An interesting side note is that News Corp once owned the Los Angeles Dodges which they ultimately sold for $430 million (http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_206.html) to a private owner. Ideally a break up of the Tribune would result in a baseball fan owning the Cubs.

So who will ultimately own my beloved Cubs? When will they ever win the World Series? Perhaps I missed it but why haven't the sports writers commented on this pending Tribune sale/break up?

See you at the Cubby Bear,

Todd

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Check out this story from Crain's Chicago Business for a closer look at the implications for the Cubs if Tribune is sold or broken up:

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=23533