Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Will latest tronc rift end badly for Union-Tribune?
Board room battle reported at Chicago-based chain with funny name
Michael Ferro
San Diego's Union-Tribune, accustomed to more than 60 years of family fights and corporate ruptures as it slowly ran downhill, appears in for more of the same, judging by a March 17 report in Crain's Chicago Business, which says a "major rift" has opened in the boardroom of tronc, the company then called Tribune Publishing that acquired the U-T less than two years ago in an $85 million deal with local Republican kingpin Douglas Manchester.
Douglas Manchester
Tom Gores
David Copley
Helen Copley
Donald Tang
Patrick Soon-Shiong
Before Manchester got ahold of it in 2011, the ever-struggling U-T was owned by Platinum Equity, a vulture capital outfit run by Tom Gores. The Beverly Hills billionaire with roots in Palestine acquired the operation in 2009 from an ailing David Copley, who inherited the truncated publishing empire on the death of his mother Helen at 81 in August 2004.
She ended up with the keys to San Diego's publishing kingdom in the 1970s after an ugly legal battle with two adopted children over the estate of her late husband Jim Copley, who himself had waged a nasty courthouse engagement in the mid-1950s with his adoptive brother Bill for control of what was then known as the Copley Press.
When Tribune Publishing took over the U-T from Manchester in May 2015, employees and the paper's dwindling readership hoped that the tumult had finally ended, but the seeming curse continued with last year's arrival of Chicago's Michael Ferro, whose Merrick Ventures bought a big chunk of company stock, unceremoniously ousted Tribune's previous management, and changed Tribune's hallowed name to tronc.
Next emerged controversial biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, one of the richest men in Los Angeles, recruited by Ferro last year as an investor and vice-chairman of tronc's board to ward off an ultimately failed takeover attempt by giant newspaper chain Gannett.
In addition to his cash, Soon-Shiong was also supposed to bring robots and artificial intelligence to the newsrooms of the tronc chain, including the L.A. Times and the U-T, to "attrit" the company's already-shrinking ranks of human workers.
But tronc, which had promised to develop a bevy of news gathering and distribution gizmos in an infamous promotional video, announced last week that it had done a deal with the Washington Post, owned by Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos, for a set of online publishing tools to be hosted by Bezos-run Amazon.
"Thanks LA Times for choosing WaPo's Arc Publishing for your digital platform, and kudos to tech team at The Post!" Bezos posted on Twitter after the deal was announced.
Now, according to Crain’s, Ferro is pushing Soon-Shiong out of his board vice-chairmanship in a murky fight for corporate control. In addition, another Angeleno, Donald Tang, whose Tang Media Partners "focuses on the global entertainment and media business with particular emphasis on transactions between China and the United States," says its website, is also exiting the board.
The mixed messages from the company have continued, with a putative $100 million deal for Us magazine collapsing in mystery last week before owner Wenner Media unloaded the title to the National Enquirer.
Meanwhile, Soon-Shiong and his health technology company NantHealth have come under fire following an exposé by the medical industry reporting site STAT, alleging that much of a $12 million contribution by Soon-Shiong's nonprofit foundations to the University of Utah made a round-trip back to his company in the form of contracts for genetic sequencing.
Video:
tronc video
tronc promotional video
Here's something you might be interested in.
Will latest tronc rift end badly for Union-Tribune?
Board room battle reported at Chicago-based chain with funny name
Will latest tronc rift end badly for Union-Tribune?
Board room battle reported at Chicago-based chain with funny name
Michael Ferro
San Diego's Union-Tribune, accustomed to more than 60 years of family fights and corporate ruptures as it slowly ran downhill, appears in for more of the same, judging by a March 17 report in Crain's Chicago Business, which says a "major rift" has opened in the boardroom of tronc, the company then called Tribune Publishing that acquired the U-T less than two years ago in an $85 million deal with local Republican kingpin Douglas Manchester.
Douglas Manchester
Tom Gores
David Copley
Helen Copley
Donald Tang
Patrick Soon-Shiong
Before Manchester got ahold of it in 2011, the ever-struggling U-T was owned by Platinum Equity, a vulture capital outfit run by Tom Gores. The Beverly Hills billionaire with roots in Palestine acquired the operation in 2009 from an ailing David Copley, who inherited the truncated publishing empire on the death of his mother Helen at 81 in August 2004.
She ended up with the keys to San Diego's publishing kingdom in the 1970s after an ugly legal battle with two adopted children over the estate of her late husband Jim Copley, who himself had waged a nasty courthouse engagement in the mid-1950s with his adoptive brother Bill for control of what was then known as the Copley Press.
When Tribune Publishing took over the U-T from Manchester in May 2015, employees and the paper's dwindling readership hoped that the tumult had finally ended, but the seeming curse continued with last year's arrival of Chicago's Michael Ferro, whose Merrick Ventures bought a big chunk of company stock, unceremoniously ousted Tribune's previous management, and changed Tribune's hallowed name to tronc.
Next emerged controversial biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, one of the richest men in Los Angeles, recruited by Ferro last year as an investor and vice-chairman of tronc's board to ward off an ultimately failed takeover attempt by giant newspaper chain Gannett.
In addition to his cash, Soon-Shiong was also supposed to bring robots and artificial intelligence to the newsrooms of the tronc chain, including the L.A. Times and the U-T, to "attrit" the company's already-shrinking ranks of human workers.
But tronc, which had promised to develop a bevy of news gathering and distribution gizmos in an infamous promotional video, announced last week that it had done a deal with the Washington Post, owned by Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos, for a set of online publishing tools to be hosted by Bezos-run Amazon.
"Thanks LA Times for choosing WaPo's Arc Publishing for your digital platform, and kudos to tech team at The Post!" Bezos posted on Twitter after the deal was announced.
Now, according to Crain’s, Ferro is pushing Soon-Shiong out of his board vice-chairmanship in a murky fight for corporate control. In addition, another Angeleno, Donald Tang, whose Tang Media Partners "focuses on the global entertainment and media business with particular emphasis on transactions between China and the United States," says its website, is also exiting the board.
The mixed messages from the company have continued, with a putative $100 million deal for Us magazine collapsing in mystery last week before owner Wenner Media unloaded the title to the National Enquirer.
Meanwhile, Soon-Shiong and his health technology company NantHealth have come under fire following an exposé by the medical industry reporting site STAT, alleging that much of a $12 million contribution by Soon-Shiong's nonprofit foundations to the University of Utah made a round-trip back to his company in the form of contracts for genetic sequencing.
Video:
Comments
tronc video
tronc promotional video