Media

Top Chicago Tribune editor Bruce Dold fired

In the second bloody shakeup at Tribune Publishing since a new chief executive took over the newspaper giant earlier this month, the publisher and editor-in-chief at the Chicago Tribune has been axed.

Bruce Dold, a winner of a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, will exit on April 30. The editor-in-chief role will be taken over by Colin McMahon, chief content officer at Tribune, the company told staffers in a Thursday memo obtained by The Post.

Tribune — which also publishes the New York Daily News and the Baltimore Sun, among other papers — hasn’t yet named a new publisher for its flagship paper. McMahon will report to Par Ridder, general manager of the Chicago Tribune Media Group, the memo said.

Managing editor Peter Kendall, a 32-year veteran, is also out as of Feb. 28. No replacement has been named.

“The Trib folks are pretty shaken up. They are interpreting this as very bad news,” a Tribune Publishing insider told The Post.

The worry is that “metrics drives decisions on story coverage,” the source added. “We will be using more syndicated copy. There will likely be staff cuts.”

The moves are the latest enacted since former chief financial officer Terry Jimenez was elevated to CEO, replacing Tim Knight three weeks ago. Days after he took the reins, Jimenez fired at least a half-dozen executives with the rank of vice president or higher, sources close to the company said.

Among the casualties was Grant Whitmore, who himself had chopped half of the editorial staff at the Daily News in a brutal, one-day bloodbath in July 2018.

In another startling move to slash costs, Tribune this month said Robert York, editor-in-chief of the Daily News, would additionally be put in charge of running the Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Heath Freeman’s Alden Global, infamous for deep cuts to newsrooms in other newspaper companies it controls, acquired 32 percent of Tribune Publishing’s stock in November.

The New York-based hedge fund placed two members on Tribune’s expanded board in December and signed a standstill agreement that expires in June, pledging to not acquire more than 33 percent of the company’s stock.

The standstill expires at the same time that a similar agreement signed by the second-largest shareholder, Patrick Soon-Shiong, also expires.

Many expect that Soon-Shiong will be anxious to sell. The billionaire doctor acquired the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune from Tribune Publishing for $500 million in June 2018, but the once-profitable papers are now bleeding red ink.

Soon-Shiong boosted the LA Times’ newsroom ranks by 25 percent, but the paper is now in the midst of a voluntary buyout offer. One reliable source said the LA Times has flipped from making $55 million in 2017, the year before he purchased it, to losing $50 million last year.

If Soon-Shiong sells his 24 percent Tribune stake to Alden, as many are speculating, it would put a hedge fund known for slashing newsrooms and selling off real estate in charge of the newspaper giant that also publishes the Hartford Courant, the Capital Gazette and the Southern Florida Sun-Times, among others.