By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2011
In March 2011 FishbowlLA parsed a piece of bankruptcy-court testimony from the LA Times publisher — and read a warning between its lines.
Then
LA Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein took the stand in the Tribune Company bankruptcy trial. FishbowlLA, working from a Bloomberg dispatch, zeroed in on one passage of his testimony.
Hartenstein said the bankruptcy had prevented Tribune from keeping pace with the publishing industry by ‘consolidating operations,’ and had blocked it from pursuing new ventures with media partners. ‘We are hampered and hobbled by the fact that we are still in bankruptcy,’ he said.
FishbowlLA translated the corporate language with characteristic skepticism, asking whether ‘consolidating operations’ was simply a euphemism for layoffs — and whether Hartenstein was signaling that emerging from bankruptcy would mean more newsroom cuts, not fewer.
Now
The skeptical reading was sound. Tribune emerged from its long bankruptcy in late 2012, and the years that followed brought exactly the kind of contraction FishbowlLA suspected — further rounds of cuts as the company restructured, spun off its newspapers and rebranded, briefly and infamously, as tronc.
The Los Angeles Times itself only found stable ground when it was sold out of that corporate structure in 2018 to biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, ending decades under Chicago ownership.
The testimony reads now as a small window into a slow institutional crisis — a publisher describing, in the careful language of a bankruptcy court, a business model that the next decade would force the LA Times to rebuild almost entirely.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.