Two Daily Pilot veterans have launched an Internet news site after being unable to buy The Daily Pilot from its bankrupt parent company, Chicago-based Tribune Co.
Tom Johnson, the former publisher of the Daily Pilot, and Bill Lobdell, the paper’s former editor, started the Newport-Mesa Daily Voice site last week after failing to raise the $500,000 to $1 million needed to buy the struggling newspaper.
“We believed we had a chance at buying the Daily Pilot out of bankruptcy court, and so everything was sort of set,” Lobdell said. “But we couldn’t raise what was needed.”
Tribune, which owns the Daily Pilot through the Los Angeles Times, filed for bankruptcy protection in December seeking relief from $12 billion in debt that largely stems from taking the company private in 2007.
Johnson and Lobdell approached the New York bankruptcy court handling Tribune’s bankruptcy in January about acquiring the Costa Mesa-based Daily Pilot, which had been scaled back.
“The Pilot, with its skeleton crew, tries as hard as they can,” Lobdell said. “It’s a miracle they put out a paper every day with the staff they have.”
Johnson and Lobdell received no immediate response to inquiries they made in January to the court about buying the newspaper.
Instead, they continued with their plans to launch a nonprofit daily Internet news site and weekly publication covering Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.
The pair heard back months later from the bankruptcy court, which seemed interested in the possibility of unloading the paper.
“It was tough because it’s so small,” Lobdell said. “The Tribune bankruptcy is something like $12 billion and the Daily Pilot isn’t even on their radar screens.”
Johnson and Lobdell retained lawyer Michael Carroll of Irvine-based CorpGen Counsel to solicit venture capital for their Web-print news hybrid.
Ultimately, they were unable to find any funding for the acquisition.
“They would have played ball, but we couldn’t get the money to play ball with,” Lobdell said. “Investors had lost 40% of their wealth in the last three months. There just wasn’t the money in the community to raise what we needed.”
Do It Anyway
The pair decided to launch the Web site after their plans for the Pilot fell through.
“We were depressed for about a day, but had all this energy and a great concept,” Lobdell said. “We said to each other, ‘Why don’t we just do it anyway.'”
The news Web site will include community watchdog coverage, opinions and editorials, an events calendar, local sports and videos.
The idea is to generate revenue through advertising sales and donations at first, according to Lobdell.
Originally, the idea was for a nonprofit newspaper, based on the PBS model.
“When we presented that model to our investors, they said no way,” Lobdell said. “They said ‘If we’re going to invest in this, we want a return for our money.'”
The pair still is working on plans for a potential weekly print product.
Lobdell hinted that the newspaper has some innovative revenue generating plans, but said it was too early to say what.
“This is a huge risk in this economy,” Lobdell said. “We want to be rewarded if we succeed and unlock the secrets to a successful local paper.”
