Depressing news

Tribune Co. execs Randy Michaels and Sam Zell answered questions from Tribune Co. reporters on a conference call Tuesday. I've posted the entire transcript here.

Below, Michaels responds to a question about cuts made to The Morning Call by comparing today's financial struggles to what newspapers went through in Great Depression:

And look, this is not without precedent. I just read that in 1929 after The Crash, the Colonel cut the Chicago's Tribune size, closed a lot of the foreign bureaus and cut the number of reporters in Chicago down to 83 in order to stay alive through the Depression. So this is hardly unprecedented, it's not the first time. But we're seeing revenue declines that start to approach those levels. And I think we're going to come nowhere near those kind of draconian cuts that had been made before to keep these papers alive.