The new board is heavy on entertainment industry veterans and includes former Yahoo and News Corp. exec Ross Levinsohn, former News Corp exec Peter Liguori, former Walt Disney exec Peter Murphy and entertainment attorney Craig A. Jacobson, along with Tribune Co. CEO and Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein and Bruce Karsh and Kenneth Liang of Oaktree Capital Management, which owns 23 percent of the new company. The Chicago Tribune notes that Liguori is expected to be named CEO in coming weeks, replacing Hartenstein.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

“Before cash distributions and new financing, a 2012 analysis by financial adviser Lazard valued the broadcasting assets, including the TV stations, WGN-AM 720, CLTV and national cable channel WGN America, at $2.85 billion. Other strategic assets, such as online job site CareerBuilder and cable channel Food Network, are worth $2.26 billion.

Tribune Co.’s newspaper holdings, including the Tribune, Los Angeles Times and six other daily publications, have withered to $623 million in total value, according to Lazard.”

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett and Aaron Kushner have expressed interest in buying Tribune Co. papers.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Steve Broer

As news guru Ken Doctor notes in a Nieman blog post, the LA Times and Chicago Tribune are set to come on the block in 2013. Meanwhile, there are reliable rumors that the venerable Financial Times and part of The Economist will be shopped early next year too.

While news of the sales have been around for a while, they are made more interesting by Doctor’s prediction that regulators could relax cross-ownership rules that limit how many TV and newspaper properties a media titan can own in the same market. Here’s the key upshot from Doctor:

Today, though, most of the reporting power, much of the brand power, and the political power still resides in big companies and their leadership. We may well get our strongest display of that early in 2013: In Washington, the FCC cross-ownership debate may move to center stage in January.

It’s a pretty safe bet that the coming newspaper sales are beyond the reach of people not named Buffett, Bloomberg or Murdoch. More interesting will be five years from now — to see if the titles are still around and if, by then, companies like Twitter, Google or Facebook have media mogul aspirations of their own.

(Image by Everett Collection via Shutterstock)

First, some background: Reuters and the LA Times on Friday cited two senior News Corp executives to say that Tribune Corporation will soon exit bankruptcy and that CEO Rupert Murdoch is in “preliminary talks” to acquire its two flagship properties, the Times and the Chicago Tribune. News Corp today said this was “wholly inaccurate.”

Despite the denial,the reports are consistent with earlier credible reports that “Mr. Murdoch has long eyed titles such as the Los Angeles” ties. There is also Murdoch’s recent travel schedule:

In Windy City, Chicago.What a truly great metropolis.Great challenges, but great people.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) October 18, 2012

Putting aside the “will he or won’t he” question, there is the more basic question of whether such a deal would make business sense. Frankly, it’s hard to see how it does.

News Corp, recall, is in the process of spinning off its publishing assets from the cable and entertainment empire that brings in most of its cash. The company has yet to disclose the degree that it will capitalize the new publishing company but it’s safe to assume that the future corporation’s newspaper budgets will be scrutinized like never before. The challenge seems especially daunting given that the new company’s biggest asset will be Australian newspapers — which are still squeezing out strong earnings from print ads but otherwise seem on borrowed time.

If Murdoch plans to add flagship papers in Chicago and Los Angeles, he will have to come up with a quick plan to monetize them. While News Corp’s Wall Street Journal has been a model for paywall success, a lot of this success derives from its role as a business brand. If the LA Times and Chicago Tribune brands are to survive in the long run, they will likely need additional revenue streams beyond advertising and subscriptions.

It’s possible that Murdoch could use a flagship news presence in America’s three biggest cities to find new efficiencies of scale — a task that would be easier if regulators loosen restrictions to permit direct partnerships with the cities’ Fox affiliates.

All of this is speculative, of course, until Murdoch reveals his true intentions. But if he makes a play for Chicago and LA, he will have to act quickly to persuade investors that the plan isn’t simply the swan song of the last of the great newspaper barons.

Zite was already working with CNN (its parent company), Fox Sports, the Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Bleacher Report, HLNtv, Motley Fool, The Next Web and VentureBeat.

Zite publisher partners share their “best-of” content in their own sections of Zite’s app, which is available for iPad, iPhone and Android. Like the rest of the content delivered through Zite, partner publishers’ content is subject to an algorithm that delivers personalized stories to users based on their likes and dislikes.

Publishers don’t pay Zite to be included in the program. “We believe there is adequate value being created for both parties in the terms of the agreement,” a company spokeswoman said.

Zite’s competitors are also entering into more partnerships with publishers, though their business models work in different ways. The New York Times is now making its content available to paying subscribers through Flipboard as part of its “NYT Everywhere” program, with Flipboard’s revenue derived from advertising. Pulse partnered with the Wall Street Journal  to offer content subscriptions through its app and is sharing the subscription revenue.

The Chicago Tribune will at last begin charging for its online content through an innovative scheme that will also give readers access to a premium package of third party content, the newspaper has told paidContent. Under the plan, readers will see selections from the Economist and Forbes magazines included in a new paid section, which will also include Tribune content that has been newly designated as premium.

According to Digital VP Bill Adee, the Tribune will not block readers from content at first but will instead ask them to register. This registration period — which will be introduced in the next few days — is intended to let readers know that a payment plan is on the way, and will also serve to familiarize them with a site redesign the Tribune is introducing at the same time. The paper says it plans to begin introducing article limits for non-subscribers later this year.

The Economist and Forbes content is being supplied via NewsCred, a news platform that relies on technology to rapidly curate and license content from over 800 partners. Adee says the Tribune will be able to get the other publishers’ content for rates equivalent to a newswire service and that the paper is in the process of adding another business news partner in coming weeks (it could be Bloomberg — a NewsCred client — but that is just a guess).

“If you ask people to pay more than you asked before, they’ll expect more from you,” explained Adee, adding that the Tribune also plans to make several dozen e-books available to online subscribers. The paper’s own account of the changes is here.

The Chicago Tribune is among the last major papers in the country to introduce a paywall which has given it times learn from others’ efforts. These include the “metered” strategy (allowing casual readers to see a certain number of articles for free) which is now nearly universal and a decision to make content shared via social media available to everyone. The Tribune is also following the LA Times‘ effort to make online subscribers feel that they are buying a membership to more than just the paper; the latter does so by offering tickets and event discounts to its subscribers.

The Tribune‘s decision to include content from the Economist and Forbes is by far the most intriguing part of its strategy. It means the paper will have to earn more digital revenue simply to pay for the outside content. But the approach stands to pay off by offering Tribune readers a richer world of reading behind the paywall without having to put too much of its content out of sight (Adee says the competitive landscape means coverage of the Cubs and other Chicago sports will remain available to everyone).

For Forbes and the Economist, the plan appears to make perfect sense. While there is a small risk of cannibalizing existing readers, this will be offset by the fact that not all of their content will be available and by the opportunity to expose their brand to hundreds of thousands of new readers. There is also a paycheck for the third party publishers. NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam would not disclose specific revenue figures and only revealed, “we’re able to give our providers a significant monthly payment.”

(For more on NewsCred, see “Technology, middlemen and the future of news“)

(Image by Steven Broer via Shutterstock)

Ongo was founded by former eBay and PayPal exec Alex Kazim and aimed to aggregate news while charging for some content from big newspapers. NYTco’s Martin Nisenholtz described Ongo as a “Hulu of news.” But as Nieman explains, the pricing scheme was confusing:

A basic Ongo subscription gave you access to content from The Washington Post and USA Today — but only “Top Stories” from Reuters, “Selected Content” from the Financial Times, and “Picks” from The New York Times. If you wanted to add more publications beyond the core offerings, those came at significantly varied prices — 99 cents a month for Slate, Salon, or Engadget; $3.99 for the Christian Science Monitor; $9.99 for the Chicago Tribune or The Miami Herald; either 99 cents or $14.99 a month for The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, depending on how much of it you wanted; and so on.

Some of the content that Ongo charged for was free on the publisher site. And to further complicate things, the New York Times launched its own paywall in March 2011, just a couple months after Ongo opened for business. At launch, Ongo charged $6.99 per month for a subscription; that cost was later lowered to $1.99, but it wasn’t enough to save the site.

Ongo’s closure leaves RR Donnelley’s Press+ as the largest standing paywall solution, with around 350 publications using the service. Press+ cofounder Gordon Crovitz recently proclaimed to the Wrap, “Paywalls won’t save news publishing by themselves, but…it’s the single biggest new source of revenue for papers.” But Ongo’s failure suggests paywall implementation may be best left to individual papers — and that readers don’t want to pay for an aggregation site.