evt_logoA complete disaster seems to have been avoided in the East Valley. The Tribune, which might have closed entirely at the end of the last year, has been rescued, sort of, by a company called Thirteenth Street Media, which is based in Boulder, Colorado.

The owner of Thirteenth Street, Randy Miller, also owns a weekly paper it distributes to the tonier areas of North Tucson and a weekly called the Telluride Daily Planet in Colorado. Stories from Tucson make it seem like the former is a slight outfit and getting slighter.

On the other hand, the latter, the Telluride paper, doesn’t seem to be a silly operation. It’s not an easy feature to get going or to use, but it does boast an “e-Edition” that lets you see what the actual printed paper looks like, and it seems to carry actual news, despite its small circulation.

On the other hand, there are still a few hitches in the giddyup web-wise, as this this About Us page demonstrates.

Nick Martin has a lot of details on the sale in Heat City:

Under the just-announced deal, Miller would get the three newspapers, their printing presses and the building in Sun City occupied by Daily News-Sun, as well as all the trimmings that go along with owning a newspaper, such as its fleet of vehicles and use of trademarks.

Noticeably missing from the deal, however, is the Tribune’s headquarters in downtown Mesa, which the county government says is worth almost $7 million.

In exchange, Miller would pay $2.05 million. But he would also take over an operation which Freedom said is losing about $60,000 a week.

Any deal is still subject to approval from the federal bankruptcy judge in Delaware who is overseeing the case. The same judge will also be choosing from among the bids if others decide to compete against Miller.

Other bidders have until March 8 to submit their offer. A hearing will be held the following day to discuss the sale, and the judge could decide as soon as then whether to allow the deal to take place.

A superficial PBJ story on the sale here. It says that the Telluride Daily Planet is a weekly. All I could find in the Republic is this four-graf story.

How embarrassing is it that an unpaid blogger like Nick Martin completely out-reports the newsrooms staffs of two established news organizations on a business story involving an institution—a newspaper—that’s obviously part of a lot of people’s daily lives?

Despite its impressive win of a Pulitzer last year, for a series on Joe Arpaio, the Tribune has lost many employees in the last year and now publishes just three days a week.

It may or may not be true that the EVT is losing $60,000 a week. (A company like Freedom can make any sort of financial case it wants.) And it’s possible that the ancillary publications will help out. Still, it’s hard to believe a company the size of Thirteenth Street is prepared to carry any losses very long, and that’s not including the issue of how much debt it’s taken on to finance the deal. (Even in newspaper fire sales, debt is killing a lot of recent deals.)

All that said, $60,000 is the equivalent of some 60 employees. Even if the new owners can somehow find some internal savings that had eluded Freedom, it’s hard to see how it’s repositioning the paper for the future isn’t going to include some significant new layoffs.