Latest Salt Lake Showdown Is Over 'Trib's Value

By: Mark Fitzgerald The former owners of The Salt Lake Tribune have asked a federal judge to break the logjam in determining its value, claiming William Dean Singleton, MediaNews Group Inc.'s vice chairman and CEO, is "manipulating" the appraisal process to keep them from exercising their disputed option to buy back the paper.

Randy Frisch, chief operating officer of the McCarthey family's Salt Lake Tribune Publishing Co. (SLTPC), said Singleton was "mickeying" the process by arranging a wildly high valuation of the paper MediaNews bought for $200 million two years ago and by trying to install his own tie-breaking third appraiser. SLTPC said it "had caught Dean Singleton ... cheating" by contacting Robert J. Broadwater, managing director of the New York media merchant bank Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS). Frisch said Broadwater had told him that Singleton offered a $500,000 fee if VSS were the third appraiser.

However, in a Sept. 9 letter to Frisch included as an exhibit in SLTPC's court filing, Broadwater denied Singleton asked VSS to be the third appraiser or promised a fee. "At no time ... was the subject of fees ... raised by Mr. Singleton or us," Broadwater wrote.

Singleton argued SLTPC is stalling the process because it has not offered a third appraiser with required newspaper-auction experience.

MediaNews' appraiser, newspaper broker Owen Van Essen, valued the paper at $380 million, while SLTPC's appraiser, Willamette Management Associates, priced it at $218 million, or about 11.5 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA). "Mr. Singleton's appraisal [of] more than 20 times [the] trailing 12-month EBITDA of $18.3 million, to us, makes it perfectly clear he is trying to manipulate the system," Frisch said. Singleton, who said he got a bargain when he bought the Tribune because of the unusual legal complications of the sale, countered that Willamette "has never appraised a newspaper" and used a valuation method designed to depress the price.

The increasingly bitter and personal dispute between Singleton and the McCarthey family represented by Frisch, may be moot because the Tribune's joint-operating-agreement partner, The Deseret News, opposes the family's return to ownership. SLTPC is appealing a federal judge's ruling that the News can veto a McCarthey purchase.