Tribune Media
American media conglomerate (1861–2019)
Tribune Media Company, formerly known as the Tribune Company, was an American multimedia conglomerate headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Through Tribune Broadcasting, Tribune Media was one of the largest television broadcasting companies, owning 39 television stations across the United States and operating three additional stations through local marketing agreements. It owned national basic cable channel/superstation WGN America, regional cable news channel Chicagoland Television (CLTV) and Chicago radio station WGN. Investment interests include the Food Network, in which the company had a 31% share.
Prior to the August 2014 spin-off of the company's publishing division into Tribune Publishing, Tribune Media was the nation's second-largest newspaper publisher behind the Gannett Company, with ten daily newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel and The Baltimore Sun, and several commuter tabloids.
In 2007, investors bought the company, taking on substantial debt. The subsequent 2008 bankruptcy of the Tribune Company was the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry. In December 2012 the Tribune Co. emerged from bankruptcy. Tribune announced its sale to Hunt Valley, Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcast Group on May 8, 2017, but on August 9, 2018, Tribune cancelled the sale and sued Sinclair for breach of contract. On December 3, 2018, Nexstar Media Group announced that it would merge with Tribune Media for $4.1 billion.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Tribune Media” is american media conglomerate (1861–2019). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Tribune, Media and American, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american media conglomerate (1861–2019)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2140077. VIAF identifies the subject as 155934226. The Library of Congress control number is n80036602. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2007, 2008 and 2012.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Tribune Media”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Tribune Media primary sources, Tribune Media archive and Tribune research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Tribune Media” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.