AT&T Broadband has agreed to sell its interest in The Salt Lake Tribune to MediaNews Group Inc., an AT&T spokesman said today.
But The Salt Lake Tribune plans to try to block the sale in court, said editor James E. Shelledy. A MediaNews Group attorney was not allowed to speak to employees when he stopped by the Tribune today.
"(The Tribune) is a non-strategic asset for AT&T," said AT&T Broadband spokesman Steve Lang. "We're not really in the newspaper business."
Lang said the company expects to finalize the sale of the paper by the end of the year. He would not disclose terms.
The Tribune was owned by descendants of mining magnate and turn-of-the-century Sen. Thomas Kearns until 1997, when it merged with TCI, a cable company. AT&T, in turn, purchased TCI last year.
For that sale, the Kearns family wrote a clause into the contract declaring Tribune management would get a chance to buy back the paper in 2002.
Tribune publisher Dominic Welch has said in the past that the clause would be applicable to any owner, meaning the Tribune would expect MediaNews to honor AT&T's contract.
"That's the unusual part of this," said John Morton of Morton Research Inc., a media consulting group in Washington, D.C.
"It's a little confusing in that respect," he said. "(MediaNews president) Dean Singleton's not known for making dumb investments."
Denver-based MediaNews, which was founded by Singleton and Richard B. Scudder in 1983, is the nation's seventh-largest newspaper company.
Including the Tribune, it now publishes 48 daily papers and 94 non-daily publications in 12 states with a combined daily circulation of 2.1 million, with 2.2 million in Sunday circulation.
MediaNews Group said acquiring the Tribune, along with its ownership of The Denver Post, would enhance its presence in the Rocky Mountain region.