The head of a group of local business people seeking to purchase the Baltimore Sun from the Tribune Co. told The Examiner that “serious negotiations” are under way to return the daily newspaper to local ownership.
“We?re getting there,” said Ted Venetoulis, a publisher and former Baltimore County executive.
At a political event last Friday, Venetoulis was even more encouraging when Baltimore City Council member Mary Pat Clarke asked him about the deal. “We?re really going to get it,” Venetoulis told Clarke, and he thought it would happen in the next 30 or 60 days.
Venetoulis heads a group of local business people including Robert Embry, president of the Abell Foundation, which was founded by the original private owners of the Sun.
Tribune Co. was initially unwilling to discuss selling the Sun to Venetoulis? group, but it has come under increasing pressure from members of the Chandler family, original owners of the Los Angeles Times, to improve its stock performance.
Newspaper consultant John Morton said the company is now apparently willing to sell individual media properties, especially in markets where they don?t have ownership of a newspaper and television station in the same market.That would include Baltimore. He also said company executives are believed to have talked with investment bankers about a leveraged buyout that would take the company private.
How much the Baltimore Sun would be worth is difficult to determine, Morton said. “You really have to know the financials to know what that is.”
The purchase price of newspapers has likely declined as all metropolitan dailies have seen a continuing loss of circulation, Morton said. In the most recent deal, on Dec. 26 McClatchy Co. agreed to sell the Minneapolis Star Tribune for $530 million, less than half what it had paid for the paper eight years ago.
“All metro dailies have had difficulty maintaining revenue flows,” Morton said.
Private owners “take a longer term look” than Wall Street does, Morton said, but such ownership “brings restrictions of its own,” as investors need to satisfy their lenders.
