Clock Ticks In Salt Lake City

By: Paul Foy, AP Business Writer (AP) A federal appeals court was considering on Monday whether to temporarily block MediaNews Group Inc. of Denver from taking over The Salt Lake Tribune.

The McCarthey family, whose interest in the newspaper goes back four generations, filed an emergency motion with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals asking to stop this week's transfer of control.

The McCartheys are trying to head off the takeover by claiming a disputed right to buy back the Tribune, but the family's right to continue operating Utah's largest newspaper expires at midnight Wednesday. After that, it could be turned over to MediaNews.

MediaNews, which bought the Tribune for $200 million in January 2001, has been waiting for the McCartheys' options to expire.

In court briefs filed Monday, MediaNews asserted the McCartheys' bid was risky to begin with and doomed to failure because of opposition from Salt Lake City's other daily newspaper, The Deseret News.

The News, an afternoon paper owned by the Mormon church, is using its 50-year-old joint operating agreement with the morning Tribune to block the McCartheys' bid.

The News submitted its own court filing Monday, saying the McCartheys, "having sold their interest in The Salt Lake Tribune," were asking the appeals court "to rescue them from the contracts they negotiated."

MediaNews and the Deseret News asked the Denver-based court not to intervene in a business deal made by Kearns-Tribune stockholders five years ago. The Tribune has had three successive corporate owners since then.

Phil McCarthey, chairman of a management group whose control of the Tribune expires Thursday, and his four siblings took a full page in Sunday's edition to put the family's quandary on display, insisting to readers that they would prevail in the ownership battle.

By 1997, when Kearns-Tribune's early investment in cable television dwarfed the newspaper's own value, more than 200 stockholders decided to merge the company in a lucrative stock swap with Tele-Communications Inc. McCarthey and two of his siblings took out options to manage the paper for five years and buy it back this summer.

But those agreements disintegrated after the Tribune gained another owner, AT&T Corp., which wanted out of the publishing business and found it easier to sell to MediaNews than to the McCartheys or the Deseret News.