DENVER—A settlement has been reached in a long and contentious legal battle over ownership of the Salt Lake Tribune.
Denver-based MediaNews, one of the nation’s largest newspaper companies, announced the settlement Wednesday without releasing financial terms. It said the settlement resolved all litigation pitting the Tribune’s former owner, the McCarthey family, against MediaNews and Management Planning Inc.
The parties are completing paperwork to file soon in federal court in Utah, where issues in the dispute had been set for two trials.
Philip McCarthey, who represents the family, said Thursday the McCartheys received a “substantial settlement” but that he couldn’t divulge details.
“It’s kind of mixed (feelings) because it’s something that consumed such a huge part of your life,” he said. “On the other hand, you have to realize the Tribune is so different than when we published it.”
The complex case began when the McCarthey family and other shareholders sold the newspaper in 1997 to cable television giant TCI in a stock swap. The Tribune, Utah’s largest newspaper, had made an early investment in TCI that ballooned over the years.
The family worked out an agreement to buy back the newspaper five years later, but AT&T Corp. acquired TCI in 1999 and sold the Tribune to MediaNews two years later for $200 million.
MediaNews then offered it to the McCartheys for $355.5 million, but they refused to pay that amount.
The family claimed in a lawsuit that MediaNews and its Salt Lake City joint operating partner, the Deseret Morning News, interfered with the family’s contract rights to repurchase the newspaper because the Morning News used its rights under a joint operating agreement to veto that sale.
In addition, the McCarthey family wanted to overturn a key appraisal from Management Planning of New Jersey that established $355.5 million as the price they would have to pay for the newspaper.
MediaNews since has moved the Tribune’s staff to leased offices just west of downtown, leaving behind a brick building on Main Street in the heart of downtown. It also left a printing plant for a new facility in West Valley City.
Under terms of the settlement, pending lawsuits over the Tribune’s ownership will be dismissed and Tribune Publishing will receive an undisclosed payment from a settlement fund that will be established by some defendants.
Management Planning will receive a payment from Kearns-Tribune, a wholly owned subsidiary of MediaNews, and all other legal claims were terminated, MediaNews said.
Lawyers for the McCartheys recently disclosed they were dropping an effort to recover the Tribune. Philip McCarthey said Thursday that the newspaper is a different product today and its overall assets excluded a printing facility.
One option may be for the family to start another newspaper, although nothing is in the works now given the fluctuating industry, he said.
Philip McCarthey is a great-grandson of Sen. Thomas Kearns, a millionaire silver miner who bought the Tribune in 1901. He was chairman of a management group that controlled the Tribune until July 2002, when it was forced to give way to MediaNews.
MediaNews ranks as the fourth-largest newspaper company in the United States. Together with affiliated companies, MediaNews publishes 57 daily newspapers, including The Denver Post and The Detroit News, and about 120 non-daily publications in 13 states. It also owns a CBS affiliate in Anchorage, Alaska, and four radio stations in Texas.
W. Dean Singleton, who became chairman of The Associated Press board of directors in May, founded the privately owned MediaNews in 1983.
