Jury to decide Tribune appraisal

A federal judge has denied a complete grab for victory in the suit between the current and former owners of the Salt Lake Tribune, paving the way for the first of two cases to go to trial.

After a near-six-hour hearing Thursday, U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell denied summary judgment motions from both MediaNews, the current owners of the Tribune, and Salt Lake Tribune Publishing, which lost control of the paper in 2002. That means that after more than six years of legal battling, Cassell has decided neither side has justification for a ruling in their favor and the case must now be decided by a jury.

A nine-day trial has been scheduled to begin Sept. 4 in which the McCarthey family, owners of Salt Lake Tribune Publishing, will challenge an appraisal that set the market value of the paper at $355.5 million. The McCarthey family believes the paper was worth $200 million or less. The swing in price has precluded the family from exercising an option to buy the paper back after they lost control of it in a complex corporate takeover.

During Thursday's hearing, attorneys for both sides accused the other of bias and manipulation in the appraisal process. Attorneys for SLTP accused New Jersey-based Management Planning Inc., which conducted the contested appraisal, of being biased toward MediaNews because the MPI was holding out hope for more business from the company. MediaNews owns several other newspapers, including the Denver Post.

Attorneys for MediaNews fired back, saying they have evidence that former Tribune manager Randy Frisch supplied several banks with inaccurate profit projections to gain a higher loan. The higher the debt, they argued, the lower the appraised value would be for the paper.

MPI attorney Robert Clark called SLTP's actions, including a "campaign" to threaten and coerce the company, "a classic case of manipulation that was less than honest."

Although MediaNews objected to taking the case to trial, arguing that a jury not familiar with how a newspaper operates would have to be educated on a lot of issues, MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton said outside of court that he would have no problem taking the case to a jury. "We think the appraisal is rock solid," Singleton said, adding he believes there is no way the appraisal will be overturned.

SLTP chairman Phil McCarthey said he looked forward to taking the case to trial so that MediaNews will have to defend what McCarthey called a "preposterous appraisal."