(2008-12-11) Tribune Bankruptcy Leverage

The steady leak of advertising and readers from print to the Web has become a widening torrent in this recession year. Most Newspaper-s remain profitable, but the margins are dropping fast, with the industry losing about 15 percent of its ad revenue this year. But the companies in the weakest condition are there largely because they borrowed a lot of money to buy papers, often at inflated prices, and the biggest of those deals were struck in 2006 and early 2007. Tribune's was the biggest of those deals, $8.2 billion to take private the company whose assets include The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and 23 television stations, a transaction that almost tripled the company's debt (Leverage). (Tribune just declared Bankruptcy.)