Tribune Publishing, parent company of The Hartford Courant, is being wooed by Gannett Co., parent of USA Today and newspapers throughout the United States and the United Kingdom.
Gannett made an unsolicited proposal, with numerous contingencies, to acquire all outstanding shares of Tribune Publishing common stock for $12.25 per share in cash, according to a Tribune statement. Gannett owns no publications in Connecticut.
A Quinnipiac professor says the deal isn’t good for readers. “I think these big whales-swallowing-big-whales media deals are inevitable in the current climate, but sad — and bad for journalism,” said Kevin Convey, assistant professor and chair of journalism in the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University, a former editor-in-chief of The Daily News.
Convey said deals such as this are being made not to improve coverage for readers and users, or to find a way to effect a successful transition from legacy publishing to digital, but rather to improve, at least temporarily, the bottom-line performance of battered media companies, many of which are public.
According to Gannett, the total value of the proposal is approximately $815 million, including the assumption of certain Tribune liabilities, which include approximately $390 million of debt outstanding as of Dec. 31, 2015.
Gannett’s all cash proposal would provide Tribune stockholders a 63 percent premium to the closing stock price of Tribune on April 22, 2016, a 58 percent premium to the volume weighted average trading price over the past 90 days.
In March, the Hartford Courant abruptly fired its publisher who had only been at the helm for two months when Tribune replaced publishers at all nine of its newspapers and combined them into the editor positions.
Read more
