Tribune Company owner Sam Zell may be entertaining bids for Newsday, the company’s Long Island paper, amid mounting financial pressures.

Sidestepping a potentially nasty proxy fight, the New York Times Co. announced yesterday that it would give two seats on its board to a pair of hedge funds seeking to increase investor profits.

Timothy S. Goeglein, until Friday a White House aide and a key contact to the religious right, may go down in journalism history as the person who plagiarized so much for so little.

Howell Raines, a frequent target of media critics, has decided to become a media critic himself.

The former executive editor of The New York Times, who lost his job in 2003 in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, will serve as media columnist for Conde Nast Portfolio.

Shares of McClatchy stock hit their lowest price in a couple decades Friday, reducing the market cap of the nation’s third largest publisher of newspapers to about $900 million.

That is a stop-the-presses number. Ten years ago, McClatchy paid one and a half times that amount for just one newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which it is has since sold.

McClatchy’s stock price fell more than 70 percent in 2007. If the trend continues, it won’t be long before one of the company’s most valuable assets will be the land and facilities it owns in fast-growing urban areas like Sacramento, Miami, Charlotte, Kansas City and Fort Worth.

The colorful Sam Zell assumed leadership of the Tribune Company yesterday, after closing an $8.2 billion deal to take the company private.

Former chairman & CEO Dennis J. FitzSimons immediately stepped down, making way for Zell to assume both titles.

Son of a diplomat, a long-time journalist, a teacher, Charles Kaiser is, by any measure, well-connected.

And all of these connections made him the right person for a sitdown interview with Andrew Rosenthal, editor of the editor page of the New York Times editorial page.

Natalie Bancroft, meet Viet Dinh.

Proving it can cover its own corporate owners with energy, the Wall Street Journal yesterday gave a full account of the latest bumbling and stumbling of the Bancroft family.

Earlier this year, the family, after great indecision and internal debate, agreed to sell Dow Jones & Co., which owned the Journal, to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Sunday was a good day for devoted readers of the “Weddings/Celebrations” pages of the New York Times.

There were stories, some brief, some longer, of 41 unions, the coming together of a whole lot of lawyers, some doctors, and at least one freelance hiking and music columnist.

Analysis of the reports indicates that a trend identified in the mid-90s by David Brooks (before he became a Times columnist) is alive and well.

Bad times for newspapers can be good times for newspaper lobbyists.

Major publishers, which often cover K Street as a hotbed of corruption, spend thousands each year to advance and protect their own interests.

Yet one issue that has fueled the Washington media lobby for years may soon disappear. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin has drafted a plan that would abolish rules forbidding companies from owning both a newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same city.