Deseret News seeks 'level playing field'

Snarr denied that assertion in a brief statement on the front page of Thursday's Deseret News: "Deseret News Publishing Company is not seeking in any way to edit, own or control the voice and content of the Salt Lake Tribune." The News "supports having two newspapers under separate ownership serving the community. We are not attempting to change that situation," Snarr said.

"All we have ever sought to do is to gain a fair and level playing field. By seeking fairness at the NAC, we are not attempting to use that in any way to gain any editorial control over the Tribune," Wall said.

Tribune publisher and NAC president Welch told the Deseret News Friday that the former owners want to buy back the Tribune but not until 2002. So they want AT&T to take no action until then. He also said he believes the Deseret News has no designs on running both newspapers in the long term but does see the News as wanting to control the NAC.

He said he believed the News' statement Thursday about not wanting to own the Tribune was honest but "didn't go far enough" in not stating its interest in controlling the NAC.

For its part, AT&T will not comment to the news media, even to its own newspaper, the Tribune, on what its intentions may be. It did not return calls to the Deseret News seeking comment.

Up until 1997, the Tribune had been owned and operated by Kearns-Tribune Corp., a closely held company comprised mostly of the heirs of Utah Sen. Thomas Kearns. In 1977, Kearns-Tribune Corp. merged with cable television giant TeleCommunications Inc. (TCI) a company that Kearns-Tribune helped launch in the 1960s. K-T owned 7 percent of TCI's voting shares.

John Malone, TCI's president, made Kearns-Tribune shareholders an offer they couldn't refuse: $751 million shares of non-voting TCI stock for its voting shares. The sale also included four other small newspapers owned by K-T outside Utah.

This was a sweet deal for the Kearns-Tribune shareholders and even some long-term reporters and editors who owned K-T shares through their company retirement plan, making them millionaires overnight, a status rarely enjoyed by journalists who are not named Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather or Peter Jennings.

However, several of the K-T shareholders felt bad about selling off the family business and insisted that the sales contract with TCI contain language that allowed them to buy the Tribune back in 2002. This was supposed to keep TCI from selling the paper to anyone else.

But last year, TCI sold itself to communications giant AT&T for shares worth $55 billion, and the Tribune became an AT&T subsidiary. AT&T made it clear that it is not in the newspaper business and has no intention of hanging on to the Tribune.

This means that the Tribune will be sold again — for the third time in three years.

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Contributing: Steve Fidel