Tribune's Bid Deadline Nears With Few Suitors Signaling Keen Interest

TRIBUNE'S BID DEADLINE NEARS WITH FEW SUITORS SIGNALING KEEN INTEREST
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Sarah Ellison at sarah.ellison@wsj.com]
Wednesday night, as the final deadline for bids for Tribune Co. arrives, the company could be throwing the first large-cap media party that nobody shows up for. While a few private-equity firms are likely to band together in a half-hearted bid for the media group, compared with the spirited competitions for such properties as Clear Channel Communications Inc. and Univision, Tribune's sale process has generated mostly shrugs from the private-equity world. And there isn't a McClatchy-like suitor either, as there was with the sale of Knight Ridder last year. Instead, most of the attention lavished on Tribune has come from so-called vanity buyers, such as David Geffen and Ron Burkle, who are interested in the Los Angeles Times. But Tribune, like many other newspaper firms, is saddled with tax issues that make selling itself in pieces prohibitively expensive for would-be buyers. Tribune's last and best hopes may lie with its own major shareholders: either a bid from the Chandler family, the company's largest shareholder and the one that, ironically, triggered the whole public auction process; or a management-led buyout aided by its own McCormick Tribune foundation, the management-controlled charity that is the company's second-largest shareholder. If Tribune ends up without a good bid for the entire company, it will be back where it started more than seven months ago: with a lagging stock price, disgruntled investors and no certain path for how to solve its overarching strategic problems. Oddly, that could be a partial vindication of Tribune management.
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