Corporate Chicago's `Tribune/Los Angeles Times' Company--Part 2

(Portions of the following article appeared in the April 13, 1994 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newsweekly, Downtown).

Tribune-Times-Mirror’s Chicago Tribune Newspaper Connection

The Chicago-based media conglomerate that has controlled New York City’s WPIX-TV/Channel TV station since 1948 also owns the Chicago Tribune newspaper. In the 1990s over 715,000 copies of the Chicago Tribune were still sold each day and over 1.1 million copies of its Sunday edition were still circulated. During the 1980s about 100,000 copies of the Chicago Tribune were circulated outside Chicago’s metropolitan area, indicating the newspaper’s increasing national influence.

The Chicago Tribune newspaper operation was an extremely profitable operation during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1984, for instance, about 70 percent of all newspaper ad sales revenues in the Chicago area were obtained by the Chicago Tribune newspaper. And in a Nov. 7, 1984 article, titled “The Prosperous Tribune Co.,” the New York Times reported that “although company officials decline to disclose earnings for individual newspapers, analysts estimated that The Tribune had an operating profit of about $35 million last year…” In the 1990s over $619 million/year in gross earnings were taken in by the Tribune Company from its Chicago Tribune newspaper operation.

(Downtown 4/13/94)

Next: The Chicago Tribune’s Hidden History—Part 1