Investors make offer for Chicago Sun-Times



CHICAGO - The Chicago Sun-Times said Tuesday that a group of local investors had made a bid to buy the ailing newspaper, which filed for bankruptcy protection in March.
The Sun-Times said an investor group called STMG Holdings LLC had offered to buy the Sun-Times Media Group, which includes the flagship newspaper and its sister publications, in a deal worth about 25 million dollars.



Investors make offer for Chicago Sun-Times
It said the deal, which would be subject to approval by a bankruptcy court judge, would include up to five million dollars in cash while the investors would take on about 20 million dollars in liabilities.
It said the investor group was led by James Tyree of Mesirow Financial, a native Chicagoan with a reputation for turning around companies.
The Sun-Times said the investors had pledged to "pump tens of millions of dollars into the company to try to shepherd it back to profitability."
It quoted Jeremy Halbreich, Sun-Times Media Group's interim chief executive, as saying the company was losing between 200,000 dollars and 300,000 dollars a week.
"The new buyer group is challenging the management team to continue to rigorously review the business and get it to a break-even basis as quickly as possible," Halbreich said.
The Sun-Times Media Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 31. Chapter 11 protects a company from its creditors while it restructures.
Besides the Sun-Times, the company owns a string of weeklies and suburban papers including the SouthtownStar, Beacon News (Aurora), Courier-News (Elgin), Herald News (Joliet), Lake County News-Sun (Waukegan) and Naperville Sun.
Its top creditor is the US government. The Sun-Times Media Group owes up to 608 million dollars in back taxes and penalties from past business practices by its former owner, Conrad Black, who is currently serving a six-and-a-half-year jail term for fraud.
The US newspaper industry has been reeling from a steep drop in print advertising revenue, steadily declining circulation and the migration of readers to free news online.
Several other US newspaper groups have also declared bankruptcy including the Tribune Co., owner of Chicago's other major daily, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers.
The Rocky Mountain News of Denver, Colorado, shut down in February and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ended its print edition in March and reemerged as an online-only publication with a greatly reduced staff.
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Wednesday, September 9th 2009
AFP
           


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