Griffin clipped at Ferro-backed Tribune
JACK Griffin is out as the chief executive of Tribune Publishing — owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among other papers — just days after its biggest shareholder promised to roll up his sleeves and play a more active role in running the publishing company.
Michael Ferro, who less than three weeks ago struck a deal to become Tribune’s largest investor and board chairman, named longtime associate Justin Dearborn to replace Griffin, who still has a year left on his threeyear contract.
Dearborn has worked at several Ferrobacked companies over the years, including Merge Healthcare, where he formerly was chief executive officer.
Ferro invested almost $45 million in the struggling chain earlier this month, giving him a nearly 17 percent stake. He is also a partowner of the Chicago SunTimes.
Under Griffin, Tribune has been scooping up smaller newspaper chains near its core properties — buying the San Diego Union Tribune for more than $80 million; adding 38 suburban Illinois papers owned by rival SunTimes for $20 million and purchasing the Baltimore Sun and other Maryland papers for $40 million.
Griffin had also been pushing to buy the Orange County Register and Riverside Press Enterprises from Freedom Communications at a bankruptcy auction expected next month.
While Griffin centralized many operations in Chicago, he never relocated there from NYC and Ferro wanted a CEO in Chicago full time.
Griffin had come in postbankruptcy and shortly before the old Tribune Co. split into two, with the TV stations going to Tribune Media and the newspaper company renamed Tribune Publishing.
His stirred controversy when he fired Los Angeles Times publisher Austin Beutner. Rumors flew that LA philanthropist Eli
Broad was trying to engineer a local buyout with the ousted publisher.
“I am proud of all that we have accomplished to reorient the company and position these premium brands for the future,” Griffin said in a statement Tuesday.
Still, it must feel like Groundhog Day for Griffin. In February 2011, he was canned as chief executive of Time Inc. after less than six months on the job. Jeff Bewkes, the head of its thenparent Time Warner, blamed the split on Griffin’s leadership style, saying it didn’t “mesh” with the corporate higherups.
In a prepared statement on Tuesday, Ferro at least gave Griffin a better sendoff than he got from Bewkes. “The Board thanks Jack Griffin for his significant contributions and wishes him the best of luck in his future endeavors,” said Ferro.
Shares of Tribune on Tuesday were down 1.8 percent, to $7.21 — far below their 52week high of $21.94.
Time for Yahoo!
Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp is being dubbed the Sandy Alderson (general manager of the NY Mets) of media executives. That’s because he may be zeroing in on the media equivalent of a Yoenis
Cespedessized deal now that he is reportedly working on an agreement to devour the much larger content business of Yahoo!
Ripp, through his nearly two years at the helm of publicly traded Time Inc., has shown a penchant for homegrown talent and small incremental deals on the mergers and acquisition front.
For the Mets, Alderson changed small ball tactics when he traded for powerhitting Cespedes in the middle of last season and then this past offseason signed him to a threeyear deal worth $75 million.
Ripp, who has pledged a return to revenue growth in 2016, may also have his eye on a heavyhitter in the digital world.
Despite having only a limited war chest to spend on deals, Time Inc. executives listened to a mergers and acquisitions presentation from Citigroup on how it could pursue a taxfree deal using a loophole called the Reverse Morris Trust, according to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday. In a Reverse Morris Trust, a company can flip its unwanted assets into a new subsidiary and allow the subsidiary and a smaller company — in this case Time — to merge with it and create a new company. The corporate maneuver would allow divesting company Yahoo! to avoid taxes it would need to pay if its core business were acquired for cash by the likes of Comcast, Verizon or AT&T, all of which are rumored to be interested as well.
Time declined to comment on the speculation.
Wall Street seems jittery on the prospects. Time’s stock dropped 2.9 percent to close at $13.91. Yahoo! also dipped Tuesday to close at $30.67, down 1.6 percent.