Tribune's Troubles Continue

Tribune (TRB Quote) reported higher third-quarter profits Thursday, thanks to a series of one-time items that affected comparisons, but revenue continued to slump and the publisher had no news for investors about its plan for strategic alternatives.

Tribune's board agreed last month to explore such alternatives, and it has said it will make a decision about the company's future before the end of the year. After years of poor financial performance, Tribune is under pressure from its largest shareholder, the Chandler family, to break up the company, and some have speculated that it could even be taken private in a leveraged buyout.

Murray Schwartz, a mergers and acquisitions attorney with law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman and a former senior executive with a newspaper conglomerate that eventually became the Journal Register (JRC Quote), says Tribune will probably spin off a business that largely resembles the old Times Mirror company, another newspaper publisher that Tribune swallowed up in an ill-fated media merger six years ago.

"You would have to work hard to find a bigger mismatch in culture and expectations than the Chandler family and the traditional Tribune company," says Schwartz. "The Chandlers are an iconic newspaper family whose identity is completely intertwined with the city of Los Angeles. They were bound to clash with the buttoned-up, institutional management of Tribune, coming from halfway across the country."