It’s hard to say who comes out worse in James O’Shea’s new book, “The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers” -- the Tribune Company itself, 
Sam Zell, Mark Willes, the Chandler family, JP Morgan or any one of the myriad senior executives who cut the bottom line while pocketing huge bonuses.
The journalists don’t come out looking so great either.
I already knew the story and even so, reading this tale of bad-to-worse makes me seriously depressed.
Why did anyone think that a trash-talking billionaire, Zell, who proudly stated he knew and cared nothing about newspapers, would be able to save The Los Angeles Times and other Tribune papers?
Here’s how it turned out: bankruptcy, and an atmosphere so hostile to journalism that talent fled while everybody else cowered in fear.
O’Shea does a service in laying out precisely how much precious cash was wasted on bonuses to senior managers to close deals that had no long-term strategy for success, investment bankers with no stake in the future of the company and lawyers sorting through the bankruptcy.
For those who value newspapers and what they contribute to society, the numbers are enough to turn your stomach:
* $283 million in investment banking fees to close the $7 billion “deal from hell” -- Zell’s creative takeover of the Tribune Company, which used an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) to avoid taxes.
* $41 million in salary, bonus and stock to Tribune CEO Dennis Fitzsimons, who presided over the decline of the company, for closing the deal.
* $10 million in bonus, salary, stock to John Reardon, president of Tribune Broadcasting.
* $13.8 million to Don Grenesko, CFO, bonus, salary and stock.
* $300 million in legal fees over the bankruptcy fight.
That would be more than enough cash to run the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune for several years. In other words, they could have made the product better, instead of coming up with endless ways to refinance and cut operating costs.
But that’s starting at the end of the story.
O’Shea spent three decades at the Chicago Tribune and then led the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times for a year, giving him a front-row seat to the historic drama of decline at a great newspaper company.
He sums it up succinctly: “The greed, incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy and arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public” add up to a tale of corporate disaster.
As we headed into the 21st century, the broad strokes were well known.
At the Chicago Tribune, as at the Los Angeles Times and other papers, circulation was in decline, advertising was also ebbing, the internet was on the rise and ideas about how to counter these trends were remarkably simple: fire people, cut costs.
O’Shea does a good job of sketching the historic backdrop of the Tribune Company, and reminds us that this is not the first major dislocation in American newspapers.
