Tribune May Sell More Assets

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Although Tribune Co. is now facing revenue trends that are “worse than we expected” when the Chicago media concern went private through a December leveraged buyout, Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Zell told creditors in a conference call Thursday, “from where we sit right now, it doesn’t appear that we will have trouble meeting our commitments going forward,” the Chicago Tribune reports.


Given the deepening financial downturn in the newspaper sector, there has been speculation of late that the heavily leveraged Tribune might encounter difficulty making good on the hundreds of millions of dollars in debt obligations that are scheduled to come due late in 2008.


But Zell, when asked directly about Tribune’s liquidity, responded by saying he expects the company to be able to meet its payments.


In response to a question about the status of Tribune’s Newsday newspaper, Zell said only that “when we originally entered into (the buyout) our goal was to keep everything together,” but the subsequent erosion in revenue “has certainly put that plan into question,” and obliged Zell’s management team to consider a number of potential divestitures in addition to the cost-cutting and revenue-enhancement measures they have put in place to date.



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