Posted by chicagomedia.org on February 02, 2008 at 18:12:27:
Fox TV executive on track for Tribune Co. post
by Phil Rosenthal
Tribune Co. is poised to replace John Reardon as president of Tribune Broadcasting with Ed Wilson, who is president of Fox Television Network, sources inside and outside the company said late last week.
An announcement is expected early this coming week. Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman declined to comment.
Neither Reardon, who took the reins of Tribune's broadcast division in 2005, nor Wilson, who was said to be conducting business for Fox at the Super Bowl in Arizona, were available for comment.
Except for last month's replacement of Dennis FitzSimons with real estate billionaire Sam Zell as chairman and chief executive, Reardon would be the highest-level executive to leave Tribune Co., which owns this newspaper, since the Zell-led $8.2 billion deal to take the Chicago-based media concern private closed on Dec. 20.
Tribune Broadcasting includes WGN-Ch. 9 and 22 other television stations, as well as WGN-AM 720. Under Zell, Reardon has reported to Randy Michaels, Tribune's new chief executive of interactive and broadcasting. He previously had reported directly to FitzSimons, who headed Tribune Broadcasting before assuming the company's top jobs.
For the first nine months of 2007, Tribune's broadcasting and entertainment group had an operating profit of nearly $287 million, up 0.4 percent from the same period in 2006.
One area of opportunity Tribune Co. management sees is in improving its superstation version of WGN, which is available in 70 million homes nationwide through cable and satellite, along the lines of what Time Warner has done with what used to be its superstation, WTBS, but now is the stand-alone TBS, available in more than 93 million homes.
The company also looks to take advantage of a new partnership it has established with Local TV LLC, which Michaels used to run and in which he remains an investor, sharing certain operations among Tribune's stations as well as the 17 that Local TV either owns or is in the process of acquiring.
Chicago-born and -educated, Reardon, 54, joined Tribune as an account executive at Channel 9 in 1985. He took over Tribune Broadcasting after the 2005 resignation of Patrick Mullen, who now runs News Corp.'s Chicago duopoly of Fox outlet WFLD-Ch. 32 and My Network TV's WPWR-Ch. 50.
Wilson, who turns 51 later this month, is originally from Arkansas but his wife, Leslie, sister of newscaster Paula Zahn, grew up in suburban Naperville. He is seen as something of an entrepreneur and has been with News Corp.-owned Fox since 2004, supervising affiliate relations, advertising sales and integrated marketing operations and opportunities for the network.
Before that, Wilson helped get what was known as NBC Enterprises up and running, leaving just as NBC finalized its merger with Universal Studios. He spent four years in charge of global distribution, including foreign and domestic syndication, marketing ancillary products such as home video, merchandising, licensing, music and publishing, as well as domestic and international co-productions and co-ventures.
He earlier served as president and CEO of CBS Enterprises. But he began his TV career in 1980 as a sales trainee for Viacom in New York, working in a cubicle outside the office of a fast-rising executive named Dennis FitzSimons.