AT&T Corp. has agreed to sell The Salt Lake Tribune to MediaNews Group Inc., but managers of Utah's largest newspaper said Friday they will try to block the deal.
The Tribune was owned by descendants of mining magnate and turn-of-the-century Sen. Thomas Kearns until 1997, when it merged with cable company Tele-Communications Inc. AT&T bought TCI last year.
AT&T called the Tribune a "non-strategic asset."
"We're not really in the newspaper business," said Steve Lang, a spokesman for AT&T's Broadband division.
Lang said the company expects to complete the sale by the end of the year. He would not disclose terms.
Editor James E. Shelledy said Tribune managers will ask a court to block the sale.
Tribune General Manager Randy Frisch linked the sale to a long-running dispute with Salt Lake City's other paper, the afternoon Deseret News, which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has a joint operating agreement with the Tribune.
He accused MediaNews president and chief executive W. Dean Singleton — who is Baptist — of working on behalf of the LDS Church, which has expressed interest in moving the Deseret News to morning publication to compete head-to-head with the Tribune.
The Tribune's daily circulation is about 135,000, the Deseret News' about 66,000.
The Tribune said the switch would require the Deseret News to pay it an unspecified amount for increased operating costs and loss of profits. The joint operating agreement's terms give the Tribune 58 percent of the earnings and the Deseret News 42 percent. The two share printing, circulation and advertising departments.
Frisch claimed Deseret News managers gave him a list of demands that included sharing control of the Newspaper Agency Corp., which runs the papers' joint operations.
"They said if we didn't agree to those demands, then Dean Singleton had and would front for them to buy the paper," Frisch said.
Jody Lodovic, MediaNews' chief financial officer, called Frisch's claims "absolutely false."
"We have long wanted to buy The Salt Lake Tribune, and quite frankly it hasn't been for sale until now," he said. "We have a very good relationship with the Mormons, but we are doing this as a business decision and will run the paper as we would any other paper we own."
However, he added that MediaNews had agreed to revisit the terms of the JOA and would consider the Deseret News' request to go to morning publication.
Deseret News chairman Glen Snarr said Frisch's allegations were "ridiculous" and said he had met with Singleton only because they were concerned about the JOA.
"We talked about if he would become the owner, what sort of a partner he would make and he said, 'I'd be fair,' and that's about all," Snarr said.
When the Kearns family sold the paper to TCI, a clause in the contract declared that Tribune management would get a chance to buy back the paper in 2002 and would manage the paper in the interim.
Frisch said he thinks Singleton is unwilling to honor that clause, and The Tribune is requesting a federal injunction to stop the sale to MediaNews.
"It's a little confusing in that respect. Dean Singleton's not known for making dumb investments," said John Morton of Morton Research Inc., a media consulting group in Silver Spring, Md.
Denver-based MediaNews, which was founded by Singleton and Richard B. Scudder in 1983, is the nation's seventh-largest newspaper company. It publishes 48 daily papers and 94 non-daily publications in 12 states with a combined daily circulation of 2.1 million.
MediaNews Group said acquiring the Tribune, along with owning The Denver Post, would enhance its presence in the Rocky Mountain region.
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