At Chicago Sun-Times, portrait of a newspaper investor
It’s not every day that you get people who are anxious to tell you that they’re investing in newspapers, that great industry sector that took a swan dive into an empty swimming pool over the past couple years. Private equity firms that are getting into that game again are just that — PRIVATE.
The latest buyers of the Chicago Sun-Times and parent company Sun-Times Media Group identified themselves on Friday, however, and we’d like to share their names with you too. Good luck with the newspaper game.
- Jim Tyree, Chairman and CEO of Mesirow Financial, Managing Member, Sun-Times Media Holdings, LLC
- Andrew Agostini, Principal and Owner, J.L. Woode Ltd.
- Kevin Flynn, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Emerald Ventures, Inc.
- Ed Heil, Investor and Entrepreneur
- Michael Mackey, Senior Managing Director, Insurance Services, Mesirow Financial
- William Parrillo and Robert Parrillo, Private Investors
- Richard Price, President and Chief Operating Officer, Mesirow Financial
- Ed Ross, Principal and Owner, J.L. Woode Ltd.
- W. Rockwell “Rocky” Wirtz, President, Wirtz Corporation
- Bruce Young, Vice Chairman, Mesirow Financial
The Sun-Times’s website, by the way, has some mugshots. The rival Chicago Tribune tells us that the list is “studded with colorful Chicagoans.” Hopefully Saturday’s newspaper story will say why they are. I’m not a Chicagoan myself, so I’m relying on you readers to tell us why these people are colorful.
The New York Times tries local news, far away
If you read often enough about the supposed death of the newspaper business, you would think that the nation’s newsrooms are increasingly depopulated, barren places, with darkened offices and empty cubicles… the occasional tumbleweed blowing past. (Actually, large stretches of Tribune Co’s New York bureau look just like that, as I saw earlier this year).
In San Francisco, Chicago and other metropolitan centers, you would be wrong. It’s true that both cities bear unfortunate marks of how rough the advertising decline, rise of the Internet and financial crisis have treated their news operations: Hearst was toying with shutting down the San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago’s leading daily papers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, are owned by bankrupt companies. Improbably enough, both are turning into hot spots for local news competition.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are fighting over San Francisco, and a private equity guy has teamed up with KQED and UC Berkeley to try a nonprofit local news experiment. And now, the Times reported on Wednesday, it is targeting some other cities, including Chicago. Here is an excerpt from reporter Richard Perez-Pena’s writeup on the Times’s decoder blog:
Plans for the San Francisco edition call for adding to the paper, twice a week, two additional pages of news about northern California. At first, the added content will be produced by The Times’ own writers and editors. But eventually, the plan, as in Chicago, is to turn the production over to a local partner.
Here’s more from spokeswoman Diane McNulty, whose statement also was in the Times’s blog:
We’re in conversations with potential news providers in Chicago about adding local content to The Times. Our intent is to roll out these expanded reports in several key markets around the country with Chicago following San Francisco. The details are still being discussed. The idea is to provide additional quality local content for our readers.
Papers like the Times and Journal are trying lots of things that they hope will stem their own ad declines and keep them profitable as they face the threat of a severely diminished future. The idea is to capitalize on the problems that local papers are having by scooping up their readers and giving them a comprehensive national report along with local news. But it’s hard to see where the cost savings will come from in this Chicago case unless they find a local partner to print their papers.
