Jeffrey Cane, Managing Editor for DealBook, says that the financial blog will grow in 2011. He tells Beet.TV that new hires and more data features will be added, citing the blog’s increasing audience outside of just the financial journalism world.

DealBook has had a bit of an identity crisis in the past, but Cane seems to be confident that the site is destined for big things. He says DealBook will be feeding the nation’s “incredible appetite for financial journalism.” For the sake of the blog, he better hope readers come back for seconds, thirds and fourths.

For more, check out Media Beat’s interview with DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin from a couple weeks ago.

Well looks like it wasn’t a negotiation tactic after all. The AP is reporting (and our sister-blog FishbowlLA picked up a few minutes ago) that Sam Zell‘s Tribune Co. is in fact filing for bankruptcy.

Media conglomerate Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection Monday, as the owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs and other properties tries to deal with $13 billion in debt.

So there it is.

More details from the NYT‘s Dealbook:

In a court filing, Tribune said it had nearly $13 billion in debt, compared to $7.6 billion in assets. Most of that debt was taken on when Mr. Zell acquired the company — a deal he struck using mostly borrowed money. All of the now privately held company’s equity is owned by an employee stock-ownership plan.

The top creditors listed by Tribune in its court filing include big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank. JPMorgan listed some of the firms it had syndicated its debt to as well; that list comprises private investment firms like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’s KKR Financial, Highland Capital Management and Davidson Kempner Capital Management.

UPDATE: FishbowlDC has the letter from Sam Zell, we’ve posted the entire thing after the jump. Says Zell:

Most importantly, I want to stress that we will continue to operate our business as usual. That includes meeting payroll and covering benefits (such as healthcare, disability and others), and paying vendors for all goods and services they provide to us going forward.

So, how did we get here? It has been, to say the least, the perfect storm. A precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy have coupled with a credit crisis, making it extremely difficult to support our debt. All of our major advertising categories have been dramatically impacted.

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As a general rule we tend to steer clear of stories dealing Wall St. or finance because we know next to nothing about either. However, after glancing at the homepage of the New York Times a number of times today it became apparent even to us that things are really bad (right?). So we decided to do a little reading. Along the way, in an effort to figure out what is going on with Fannie and Freddie, and why the WSJ homepage was down, and whether or not a NYT “panic piece” had anything to do with all this — and by the way, if you are expecting any answers no need to read further — we stumbled across a story we did understand! Bloggers arguing with each each other.

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