Tribune To Acquire U-T San Diego For $85M

Tribune Publishing, the parent company of the Los Angeles Times has agreed to buy the U-T San Diego, uniting the newspapers of California's two largest cities under common ownership.

It will pay $85 million in a cash-and-stock deal for the U-T, eight community weeklies and related websites.

The acquisition will extend the company's reach into the country's eighth-largest city and give it a dominant position over a wide swath of Southern California.

“We're combining two of the most enduring institutions in California,” said Austin Beutner, Times publisher and chief executive. “We can take the best of what each newsroom can offer, and offer it to a broader customer base.”

Beutner will serve as publisher of both papers and as chief executive of the newly formed California News Group, which will oversee Tribune Publishing operations in the two markets.

Executives at both papers are examining how operations can be consolidated. One possibility is that The Times will print the San Diego paper.

The U-T, whose roots date to 1868 and which was known until recently as the San Diego Union-Tribune, serves a metropolitan area of more than 3 million. It has 622 employees, 173 of them in the newsroom.

Tribune Publishing's newspapers and their websites were spun off from Tribune Media last year as a separate, publicly traded entity. Since then, the new company has purchased publications in Chicago and Maryland to bolster its flagship papers in those markets.

The U-T is descended from the San Diego Union, established in 1868, and the Evening Tribune, founded in 1895. The Copley family bought the papers in 1928 and maintained them as separate publications until merging them in 1992.

In 2011, San Diego real estate developer Doug Manchester bought the Union-Tribune for more than $110 million. In 2012, the name of the paper was changed to the U-T San Diego.