The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday evening that Alden Global Capital is close to making an offer to buy Tribune Publishing. Alden is already Tribune’s largest shareholder, holding 32% of shares.
Tribune currently has a market cap of $467 million. The stock has traded between $4.91 and $13.90 the past 52 weeks. The 52 week low was on March 19. The 52 week high was earlier this month, on December 18.
Tribune, briefly known as tronc, is a media company which owns local media businesses in eight markets. Tribune newspapers include the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel.
The company once operated BestReviews LLC. BestReviews was sold to Nexstar for $160 million earlier this month. At the time, Tribune CEO Terry Jimenez said “This cash return strengthens our already robust balance sheet and provides financial and operational flexibility. We intend to provide a clear capital allocation strategy in the near future.” Tribune signed a deal to continue to license the BestReviews content on their sites.
The Daily Meal, a “foodie” blog, is another property in the Tribune portfolio. It offers 1.7 million recipes, signature “best of” lists, food news and restaurant related content. According to SimilarWeb, it ranked #50 in Cooking and Recipe category traffic in November 2020.
Tribune has shuttered several of its newspapers’ offices in 2020. Sites closed include the Lower Manhattan offices of the New York Daily News, the Hartford Courant offices and the newsrooms of at least 5 other newpapers. Tribune blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for the closures of physical offices. This isn’t a unique situation as other newspaper companies have also pared office space in recent months. Most staff has been working remotely since March at Gannett, for example.
Legacy media newspaper companies have been hit hard by the pandemic. Pew Research reported that advertising revenue fell by a median of 42% year over year. This was looking at Q2 results at the six largest publicly traded newspaper companies (Gannett, NY Times, Tribune, McClatchy, Lee and Belo).
Alden owns Digital First Media. The Digital First Media portfolio includes The Denver Post, St. Paul Pioneer, Boston Herald, Mercury News, East Bay Times and Orange County Register. In total, they reach over 60 million adults each month.
