Court approves East Valley Tribune sale, layoffs will hit in 'next two days'

By Nick R. Martin | March 9th, 2010 | 6:38 pm | 2 Comments »

Randy Miller photo
Randy Miller

The East Valley Tribune, which for months has survived in a state of corporate limbo, finally learned its fate on Tuesday.

The Mesa newspaper will have its fourth owner in less than 15 years after a federal judge gave his blessing for the Tribune and its sister newspapers to be sold to a small Colorado publisher for a little more than $2 million.

The approval clears the way for Randy Miller, who owns Thirteenth Street Media in Boulder, Colo., to buy the newspapers from their current owner, media giant Freedom Communications. The deal is expected to be completed before the end of the month.

“We are excited to complete the legal process and work with our employees and advertisers to build solid, community-oriented newspapers,” Miller said in a prepared statement.

As part of the deal, Miller will also get the Ahwatukee Daily News in Phoenix, the Daily News-Sun in Sun City, several small specialty publications and a building in Sun City valued by the county assessor at about $2.1 million.

In the meantime, Miller will begin to take over day-to-day operations of the newspapers until the deal formally goes through, the Tribune reported on its website.

The past four and a half months have been an agonizing period for the East Valley Tribune, a time when the newspaper was unsure whether it even had a future.

In the beginning of November, Freedom Communications, which had recently entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy, announced it planned to shut down the Tribune by the end of 2009.

The company planned to keep its other local newspapers, but the Tribune was just losing too much money to stay open, Freedom executives said.

Less than three weeks later, Miller emerged as a possible buyer of the newspaper, and Freedom agreed to keep the presses running until a deal could be reached.

All the while, the bankruptcy meant a federal judge would have to sign off before the deal went through.

Layoffs coming

But while the judge’s approval Tuesday answered a big question about who will control the Tribune, other questions remain about what Miller plans to do with the place.

In a memo sent shortly after the deal was OK’d, outgoing publisher Julie Moreno told staffers those answers will come soon enough, too.

Moreno told employees they will each find out in “the next two days” whether Miller will be keeping them on staff. Some will be given letters asking them to stay. Others will be handed a severance package and shown the door.

Miller has said previously that he plans to hang onto a “significant” number of staffers, but he has been no more specific than that.

Cuts to the newspaper’s staff, however, are likely to be deep. Freedom said recently the Tribune is losing about $60,000 a week. That means the new owner would have to cut more than $3 million from his annual costs simply to break even.

It appears employees are bracing for the worst, too. Without knowing who will be on the chopping block, staffers are already planning at least one farewell party in Tempe on Wednesday evening.

As for the rest of Miller’s plans, a story on the Tribune’s website said he expects to return the “East Valley Tribune” name to all of the newspaper’s print editions.

In 2009, Freedom Communications split the newspaper into four separate editions, naming each after the cities they covered. Readers were left receiving the Mesa Tribune, Chandler Tribune, Gilbert Tribune or Queen Creek Tribune, but there was no longer a print edition carrying the East Valley moniker.

Miller is buying the newspapers with a company called 1013 Communications, whose name appears to pay homage to the journalism program at Iowa State University. The company is affiliated with Miller’s other business, Thirteenth Street Media, which operates weekly newspapers in Telluride, Colo., and the suburbs of Tucson.

Freedom, which plans to emerge from federal bankruptcy protection later this month, bought the East Valley Tribune in 2000 from Thomson Newspapers. Thomson bought the paper from Cox Enterprises in 1996.

[Full disclosure: I am a former staff reporter for the East Valley Tribune.]