Dodgers owner Mark Walter says he’s interested in buying the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, “in part because he is interested in increasing the diversity and improving the quality of information available to the public,” Bill Shaikin writes.
“The Los Angeles Times says something,” Walter said before the Dodgers played the Boston Red Sox at Dodger Stadium. “It means something. It’s a brand. I think people have undervalued that. If the price were right, I would buy it.”
Walter is the CEO of Guggenheim Capital, LLC. Tribune Co., which owns both papers, has been exploring a sale of its newspaper properties but is said to prefer to sell them together. Some of its other newspapers are The Baltimore Sun, The Hartford Courant and the Orlando Sentinel.
The billionaires Charles and David Koch were interested in buying Tribune’s papers but they abandoned negotiations. As a policy matter, we never comment about speculation regarding the company or any of its business units,” Tribune spokesperson Gary Weitman said about the Walter report via email.
Red Sox owner John Henry recently agreed to purchase The Boston Globe, and Tribune Co. used to own the Chicago Cubs. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds recently wrote that he had previously likened wealthy people buying newspapers to wealthy people buying sports franchises: “more fun than owning a bond and a high-visibility good deed for your community as well.”
