East Valley Tribune could have a buyer

Posted by Jennifer Lush on November 26, 2009 at 12:00 PM

The East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Arizona, which has previously announced it would shut down on 31 December, has received a letter of intent to purchase the troubled paper from a Tuscon newspaper publisher.

The Valley Tribune's parent company Freedom Communications said earlier this month that the paper has been up for sale for a considerable amount of time, yet received no promising bids and announced it would begin taking steps toward closure.

Since then, the letter of intent has been received and finalised between Freedom Communications and Thirteenth Street Media, which is owned by Randy Miller and a pending sale has been confirmed by the Valley Tribune.

The price of the sale was not disclosed and will still need to be approved by the US Bankrupcy Court, though it means Miller will take on both the paper's assests and debts if it goes through.

According to a statement released by the Valley Tribune, Miller is expected to keep a "substantial number" of the paper's remaining 140 employees, and will be remodeled to resemble the structure of the Tuscon Explorer, a free weekly with a circulation of 50,000 that is also owned by Miller.

Freedom Communications filed for bankruptcy at the end of August after suffering heavy losses and growing debt. The Valley Tribune, though receiving acclamation earlier this year for the reporting carried out by two of its journalists, Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, has failed to post a profit in the last two years.

The news of the sale is a saving grace for the Valley Tribune, in what is a general climate of closures for the newspaper industry. Many local papers have been particularly exposed to this threat, with the London Lite, the Rocky Mountain Independent, and gay publication the Washington Blade amongst publications who have been forced to shut up shop recently amidst mounting debt.

The closures of such outlets have caused a stir, with many raising concern over the loss of community news sources. Editor-in-chief at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has been particularly outspoken on the issue, stressing the importance of preserving local news sources as watchdogs against corruption: "It makes me worry about all of those public authorities and courts which will in future operate without any kind of systematic public scrutiny. "

"I don't think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news in the press and broadcasting, " said Rusbridger in July.

Growing interest in the issue has seen many search for ways to essentially save local journalism. One proposed model is that of the non-profit, and the recently launched online-only, Texas Tribune, is a good case study of one of the ways in which some are attempting to preserve the practice of local journalism, even if the profitability of the industry cannot be maintained.

Source: Biz Journal