Billionaire newspaper mogul Sam Zell dies at 81.
Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon who acquired The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers in a widely criticized leveraged buyout of the parent Tribune Company in 2007, died on Thursday at the age of 81. His venture into the publishing world proved to be a resounding failure, a five-year descent into a maelstrom of rancor, downsizing, management scandals, and bankruptcy.