By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, March 2011
In mid-March 2011, FishbowlLA tracked a substantive LA-media-business moment: LA Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein took the stand in the Tribune Company bankruptcy trial.
Then
The Tribune Company bankruptcy was one of the most consequential American newspaper-industry financial collapses of the era. The bankruptcy traced directly to the disastrous 2007 leveraged buyout by Sam Zell — a deal that had loaded the company with debt just as the newspaper-advertising economy entered its catastrophic post-2008 contraction.
Eddy Hartenstein had become LA Times publisher in 2008. His background was substantially in the satellite-television industry — he had been a founding executive of DirecTV — rather than in traditional newspaper publishing.
Now
The Tribune Company emerged from bankruptcy in late 2012. The reorganized company split in 2014 into separate broadcast and publishing entities. The LA Times was sold to Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018, ending the Tribune-ownership era for the paper.
The broader Tribune bankruptcy has continued to be cited as one of the definitive cautionary tales of the newspaper industry’s financial collapse. The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment of that long collapse.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.