Posts Tagged ‘Walter Hamilton’

Reuters reporters Ronald Grover and Liana B. Baker had the scoop last Friday about New Year’s Eve being the day LA Times parent company Tribune Co. would finally, officially emerge from a four-year bankruptcy. This morning at 4:42 a.m. PT, LAT reporters Walter Hamilton and Joe Flint added circumspect confirmation in the paper’s own pages:

The company sought Bankruptcy Court protection in December 2008 after an $8.2 billion leveraged buyout by real estate magnate Sam Zell saddled the company with $12.9 billion in total debt just as advertising revenue was collapsing…

Despite the financial travails of the newspaper industry, Tribune remained profitable throughout the bankruptcy. It built cash reserves of more than $2.5 billion as of November 18, according to a U.S. Bankruptcy Court filing this month.

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In the wake of 2100 Trust LLC’s acquisition of Freedom Communications Inc., a journalist at one of the transacted publications chose to link on Facebook to an LA Times article by James Rainey and Walter Hamilton. The Colorado Springs Gazette breaking-news specialist, Barrett Tryon (pictured), also highlighted this passage:

The new owner hopes to spin off the smaller papers in separate deals by the end of the summer to help finance the purchase of the Register, according to an editor at the paper who was not authorized to speak publicly. These are the Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.; the Appeal-Democrat in Marysville, Calif.; the Desert Dispatch in Barstow; the Porterville Record, Calif.; the Daily Press in Victorville; and the Sun in Yuma, Ariz.

As subsequently detailed by Bryce Crawford of the Colorado Springs Independent, Tryon was quickly asked by his paper’s content director Carmen Boles to remove the Facebook post. He refused. “Because it’s on my personal account, and from an LA Times article,” he said later via email, “I’m not removing it. It comes down to perception and we could argue that all night long.”

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The Los Angeles Times reporter trio of Walter Hamilton, Andrew Tangel and Stuart Pfeifer discovered that Lehman Brothers awarded nearly $700 million to 50 of its highest-paid employees before their 2008 collapse as detailed in an exclusive article Friday:

The documents, which were among the millions of pages submitted in Lehman’s bankruptcy, show the list of top earners each were pledged $8 million to $51 million in cash, stock and other compensation. How much, if any, of the stock was cashed in before the bankruptcy wiped out its value couldn’t be determined.

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A Freudian Typo: Likely the LAT will have fixed this by the time you click over to this link, but in its first pass at a story about Rupert Murdoch’s successful bid to buy Dow Jones, reporter Walter Hamilton writes: “Rupert Murdoch appeared to have succeeded in his mothlong quest to take over Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s parent company.” We know Hamilton meant “monthlong,” but “mothlong” is somehow a more appropriate term for Murdoch, a man attracted to the shiny light of an iconic company — and one who will inevitably bite tiny holes in the very fabric of journalist integrity that the WSJ once enjoyed.

State Dept. Deploys The Funk: In one of the weirdest pairings we’ve ever heard of, the U.S. State Department is bankrolling a Middle Eastern tour by Ozomatli, in hopes that the Latin-infused peaceniks can help improve America’s standing in the world.

Yesterday’s News: We knew we should have put cash money on Scriptland leading this week with news from Comic-Con, the comic book convention that ended on Sunday. Admittedly, we don’t understand Scriptland, but we do understand a newspaper’s need to be first.