SL Cabbie would know. They'd be nuts to get rid of either of them. They were part of a group trying to buy the Trib. Not sure if Huntsman was involved.
I'm reserving final judgment; the Huntsman's are generally "good people," but patriarch Jon got his start euchring a relative out of what became the Huntsman Chemical Corporation way back when, and there are stories about the family's dysfunction.
Not that my own family doesn't have them, but I have no trouble raising my voice loudly and trying to bring a voice of reason to the "old insanity"--which has its roots in LDS dysfunction, of course.
There's no way that Pat or Robert Kirby--whom I've known the longest--will be tossed aside; as Will noted, "If they lose Kirby and my brother, there goes the franchise." BTW, I dropped Will a note an hour ago...
A lot of good people were shown the door, however, and I've got most of the information down about the "Singleton Era," and that slimeball, appropriately nicknamed "Dink," won't like what I have to say about his duplicity and secret sale of the Trib to a New York holding company.
As I see it, the key to the Tribune's survival will be freeing itself from the JOA which the Deseret News has used to leverage to its own advantage. Peter Huntsman is doubtless shrewd enough to see that reality; the question is how much he will kowtow to the pressure from the geriatric gnomes at #47 E. South Temple.
Anyway, if there are some out in the Exmormon crowd in Utah "in need of a mission call from Outer Darkness," I think Peter Huntsman might be a "golden prospect."
The cult buying the Trib would be like the USSR when they controlled all media through Pravda under penalty of death or banishment to the gulag (where would that be in Utah?).
Do you know, when I was studying the Chernobyl nuclear disaster I looked up the original copies of Pravda. The disaster (which was reported relatively quickly in the western press, about 24-48 hours later IIRC,) was not reported in Pravda until about nine days later, and even then it was completely buried in the middle of the newspaper, in a small article below the fold.
This is what happens when the press is not fully independent.
The mormon church should be given a choice: "you can either own a newspaper or you can have a tax-exempt religion. But you can't have both. You get to decide. So which is it?".
Radio West on KUER interviewed some people about the sale today, including those who were pressing the anti-trust lawsuit against the Deseret News because of the clause in the JOA that states the Trib can't be sold without DNews approving the buyer.
There was some feeling that one of the reasons the sale to the Huntsmans is going through is that the DNews did not want to go to court and have itself exposed and there was a good chance they were going to lose/look bad/experience bad PR.
I wish I knew more about the back story of how that JOA EVER was allowed to be put into place. Among other things, it cut the SL Trib's ad profits by 50%!!
Their once (PSEUDO-)prestigious rag, The Christian Science Monitor, went from broadsheet to tabloid two generations ago, then went to on-line only early in the Millennium. It was derided as "the newspaper that everybody respects, but nobody reads." Now, hardly anybody knows it even exists!