Tribune Co. to Exit Bankruptcy on Dec. 31 (Report)

Tribune Co. will emerge from bankruptcy on Dec. 31 and name ex-Disney strategic planning chief Peter Murphy as a board member and advisor to reported incoming CEO Peter Liguori, according to Reuters. 

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"Liguori is expected to build Tribune's TV operations, including through acquisitions," the report stated. Ligouri was an executive at News Corp's FX Network and had been the chief operating officer of Discovery Communications. 

Tribune Co. -- which counts The Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Baltimore Sun, and Los Angeles Times among its stable of newspapers -- has garnered numerous potential suitors for a possible sale of its newspaper assets. 

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch has flirted with the idea of purchasing The Los Angeles Times and adding it to a collection of U.S. papers that includes The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post tabloid. 

Conservative real estate developer Doug Manchester -- who recently snapped up both the San Diego Union Tribune and The North County Times and invested in a cable news operation for the now renamed U-T San Diego paper -- has expressed interest in acquiring Tribune papers.

 "We certainly are going to look at it," he said in October to KPBS radio. 

Aaron Kushner, who bought The O.C. Register and hired dozens of new staffers as he reinvested in the print publication by adding new sections, stated that his company was looking at acquiring Tribune papers. 

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"There's a tremendous amount of infrastructure that's shared among the newspapers, and they have been together, with the exception of the LA Times, for a long time," Kushner told the Associated Press on Thursday. "Disassembling them in an auction sort of a way or a process may be achievable, but our sense is it would end up resulting in significantly less for the current owners of the Tribune Co." 

The Los Angeles Times alone could be sold for "as much as $400 million," according to an article in the newspaper that cited industry insiders. 

This week, seven of the Tribune company's newspapers (not including The Los Angeles Times) announced that they would be dropping the wire services of the Associated Press -- a potential cost-cutting move, Time Out Chicago reported.