Randy Michaels, chief executive of the bankrupt media group Tribune Co, owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, resigned on Friday.
The Tribune Co said its board of directors had appointed an executive council to assume Michaels’ responsibilities and the company’s publishing and broadcast operations.
“The council will provide the company with stability and continuity as it enters what is traditionally the busiest time of the year for its business units and their advertising partners,” Tribune Co chairman Sam Zell said.
“Tribune has strong brands, valuable assets and innovative, dedicated employees,” Zell said in a statement.
“Its media businesses have generated solid financial performance through the first three quarters of 2010 — the company is building on that momentum,” he said.
The Tribune Co also said it expected to file a plan of -reorganization with the US Bankruptcy Court in the US state of Delaware on Friday.
Besides the Los Angeles and Chicago dailies, the Tribune Co owns the Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant and other newspapers. It also operates 23 television stations.
The Tribune Co filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2008.
Zell, a Chicago real estate titan, led an US$8 billion leveraged buyout of the Tribune Co in 2007.
The firm sold the Chicago Cubs baseball franchise and its iconic stadium, Wrigley Field, last year.
Michaels’ resignation came two-and-a-half weeks after the New York Times published an article which painted a picture of a boorish corporate culture at the Tribune Co rife with “sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective.”
The departure of Michaels followed the resignation a week earlier of Lee Abrams, Tribune’s chief innovation officer. Days -before resigning, Abrams was suspended for distributing an e-mail with video links that were “offensive” to workers, the Tribune told employees in an e-mail.
“The board took this action as a way of ensuring stability and continuity for the company and its various media businesses,” the four members of the new executive council said in an e-mail on Friday to employees.
Separately, US Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Carey in Wilmington, Delaware, said on Friday he would let the official committee of unsecured creditors use a lawsuit to recover some of the more than US$12 billion Tribune owes creditors.
The creditors have claimed that the Tribune buyout was a so-called fraudulent transfer that loaded the media company with too much debt and benefited only the shareholders, Zell and the banks that helped arrange the sale. A court-appointed bankruptcy examiner found in July that creditors may be able to recover billions of dollars through litigation.
“There are claims here based in part on what the examiner reports,” Carey said. “I think they should be pursued.
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