In mid-July 2011 Tribune Company announced a major consolidation of its publishing division — folding the Sun Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, The Morning Call, and the Virginia Daily Press under a single new CEO based in Chicago. Conspicuously absent from the consolidated structure: the LA Times. FishbowlLA read the omission as a sale signal. The actual sale arrived seven years later.
Then
Tribune’s announcement axed four senior corporate positions — Bob Gremillion (executive VP Tribune Publishing), Harry Amsden (senior VP financial operations), Naomi Sachs (senior VP publishing strategy), and Mike Gart (CFO of Tribune Media Services) — and moved their responsibilities under Tony Hunter, the Chicago Tribune Media Group publisher and CEO who was now also Tribune Co. publishing division CEO.
Hunter’s new portfolio explicitly listed the six papers above. The LA Times, the company’s largest property by circulation and the most valuable independent newsroom asset, was not under his oversight. The corporate structure that 2011 announcement created had the LA Times reporting separately — to a different chain of command, with its own publisher, with its own financial reporting.
The original FishbowlLA reading was that you don’t structurally segregate your most valuable property from the rest of the publishing portfolio unless you’re preparing to dispose of it separately. The 2008 Tribune bankruptcy had already created the framework conditions; the 2011 consolidation made the LA Times look like the asset Tribune was preparing to sell to someone outside the company structure.
Now
The sale, in fact, took seven years to arrive. Tribune Company emerged from bankruptcy in late 2012 and renamed itself Tribune Publishing in 2014. The LA Times went through multiple ownership turns in the interval — Sam Zell’s leveraged buyout legacy, the Tribune Publishing spin-off, the Eddy Hartenstein, Austin Beutner, Davan Maharaj, and Lewis D’Vorkin editorial-and-publishing churn between 2013 and 2018 — before being sold to biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong in June 2018 for approximately $500 million.
The Soon-Shiong era moved the paper out of its downtown LA building to El Segundo, attempted significant reinvestment in newsroom staffing, and then went through painful retrenchment — major layoff rounds in 2023 and 2024 that hit roughly a quarter of editorial staff. The 2011 FBLA prediction that the structural separation foreshadowed a sale was correct; the timeline simply took longer than anyone in the city’s media community would have guessed.
Tony Hunter eventually left the Tribune leadership structure. The six papers under his 2011 consolidated portfolio went through their own sale and ownership turns through the rest of the decade. The Tribune Publishing residue was eventually acquired by Alden Global Capital in 2021 — a private-equity transaction that has been widely covered as one of the more aggressive 2020s newsroom-cost-cutting plays in U.S. journalism. The LA Times escaped that particular outcome, which was probably the main thing the 2011 separation accomplished.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: July 2011 snapshot