Sam Zell visited Bloomberg TV to proclaim that Tribune Co. would be out of bankruptcy by the end of the first quarter. But when asked if he regretted the deal — if it was, in fact, the “worst business decision he’s ever made” — he didn’t back down.

“It’s certainly the most amount of money I’ve ever lost in a single deal,” he said.

However, Zell said that given the challenges facing all newspaper companies, “Nobody can survive.”

Yesterday, we had New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. comparing print media to the Titanic, and today Zell admits that the end is near. Uh oh.

Between all the layoffs at Conde Nast and The New York Times, you’d think that a journalist who still has a job would hold tight for dear life. Well, as we learned last week with ex-Tribune Co. employees starting The Chicago News Cooperative and selling their content to Tribune competitor, New York Times Co., sometimes leaving a job can be good for your career.

Now James O’Shea‘s new project has attracted another Chicago Tribune writer, famed columnist David Greising, who will be leaving Sam Zell‘s publishing nightmare for more cooperative pastures.

Greising was the Tribune‘s chief business correspondent, so it’s hard not to take his departure as a microcosm of Tribune Co.’s quickly decaying structure. Greising will be joining former Tribune managing editor James Warren and former Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski.

Tribune’s Greising Joins O’Shea’s Chicago News Cooperative –Crain’s Chicago Business

Earlier: Jim O’Shea Explains The Chicago News Cooperative

Yesterday we learned that former Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times staffers were working to create content for The New York Times that will compete with pubs owned by their old employer, Tribune Co. The former Tribune editors have created a non-profit “content co-op” called the Chicago News Cooperative, which will provide news content for the Times‘ local Chicago edition, among other news outlets.

One of the co-op’s editors, Jim O’Shea — a former Tribune and L.A. Times editor — sat down with another one of CNC’s partners, television station WTTW in Chicago, to discuss their work at greater length.

Here, O’Shea talks about the creation of the collective and its plans and goals for the future.

Earlier: Tribune Employees To Create Content For NYT In Chicago

Today’s New York Times news has to do with the buying of content from former Chicago Tribune employees. Considering that Sam Zell ran the Tribune and his other assets into bankruptcy, there’s a certain irony in those writers and editors (who formed a lawsuit against Zell last year) teaming up with Arthur Sulzberger and Co. to provide material for another paper.

And James E. O’Shea, a former Los Angeles Times editor and Chicago Tribune managing editor, is defecting to the new Chicago-based non-profit group, The Chicago News Cooperative, that will be providing the Times with local content for its Chicago edition — which is similar to the Bay Area edition launched last week.

Also part of the group, which is funded in part by The MacArthur Foundation (known for their NPR patronage and support of journalists) is Ann Marie Lipinski, former Tribune editor. That’s both great news for the Times, which is looking expand its local content to different areas of the nation, and a giant stick in Zell’s craw. Everyone wins?

Chicago News Venture To Sell Content To New York Times — New York Times

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FishbowlDC: CQ-Roll Call cut 44 jobs today, before unveiling a big restructuring of the company.

Editor & Publisher: John Sturm, the president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America told a joint economic hearing today that the newspaper industry was not looking for a government bailout.

The Boston Phoenix: The Boston Globe‘s biggest union, the Boston Newspaper Guild, has taken measures to prevent union president Dan Totten from handling union finances. “Information has come to the attention of the Executive Committee that President Daniel Totten has engaged in conduct which appears to be violative of the constitution regarding financial matters involving Local funds,” the union said in a note to members.

New York Times: Some Tribune bondholders have been granted access to documents in order to investigate the 2007 of the company to Sam Zell.

WowoWow: “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl interviews Ted Jr., Sen. Edward Kennedy‘s son, and the editor and publisher who worked with the senator on his memoir. (See video above)

Embedded video from CNN Video

FishbowlDC: The Kennedy family has turned to Twitter and the Web to get word out about plans for Sen. Edward Kennedy‘s memorial. Check it out at @KennedyNews and TedKennedy.org.

Wall Street Journal: Tribune‘s bondholders have called Sam Zell‘s $8.2 billion takeover of the company in 2007 a “fraudalent conveyance” that plunged Tribune into bankruptcy and have asked the bankruptcy court for permission to investigate.

New York Times: William A. Emerson Jr., an editor in chief of The Saturday Evening Post, died Tuesday at age 86.

The Observer: The New Yorker has appointed a new managing editor, 26-year-old Amelia Lester, a former fact-checker for the magazine. She is replacing Kate Julian, who is moving to Washington, D.C. where her husband just got a job.

E!: Kate Gosselin will be one of the subs filling in for Elisabeth Hasselbeck on “The View” while the conservative mommy is on maternity leave. “It appears Gosselin has taken the conservative host’s riled-up advice, dished out on the show in June, to ‘get a job,’” the E! article said. “Bet Hasselbeck wasn’t expecting it to be hers.”

The folks over at Cablevision may be suffering some serious buyer’s remorse this week — to the tune of $450 million. The company, which purchased Long Island-based Newsday last July from Sam Zell‘s struggling Tribune Co. announced yesterday that it plans to write down its newspaper assets by “between $375 million and $450 million.” Ouch. Per today’s New York Post:

Cablevision admitted as much in its filing, saying the pre-tax charges “reflect the continuing deterioration of values in the newspaper industry and the greater-than-anticipated economic downturn” that has hurt the paper’s advertising business.

In writing down the value of Newsday Media Group, Cablevision is wiping out nearly 70 percent of what it paid for newspaper assets. The company said the charges will be included in 2008 financial results, but will not result in any material future cash outlays.

Oh the travails of the Tribune Co. Here’s the latest. The company has confirmed that it has in fact received a federal subpoena as part of criminal charges against Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The “close associate” of Sam Zell who was allegedly approached by Blago’s people for “help”, and is now being interviewed by the FBI, has been identified as Nils Larsen. According to the Chicago Tribune Larsen is the “38-year-old financial whiz who was instrumental in Zell’s takeover of Tribune Co.” A deal Zell now concedes perhaps wasn’t as well thought out as it could have been.

Whether Larsen ever attempted to apply pressure to Tribune officials remained unclear.

At the news conference announcing the arrests, U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald declined to say how far the effort went, “other than the person who was identified as a person to be fired was not fired and still works there today.”

It should be noted that the Tribune Co. and Zell maintain they did nothing wrong and that none of the Trib‘s editorial members were fired.

Just in time for the demise of print (or maybe in recognition of it) the blogosphere has finally been made official! At least in the eyes of the Pulitzer Prize board, and really, (unless you are Sam Zell) does it get more official than that? Ha. According to the press release the Prizes “have been expanded to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet.” Meaning, among many other things, we suppose we’d better start paying more attention to our spelling and grammar. There’s also this:

The Board also has decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories…While broadening the competition, the Board stressed that all entered material — whether online or in print — should come from United States newspapers or news organizations that publish at least weekly, that are “primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories,” and that “adhere to the highest journalistic principles.

How long till someone makes the argument for Perez do you think? In keeping with the day thus far we have posted the entire press release after the jump.

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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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