Publisher Fired in Page Group Publishing Tiff
Robert E. Page, the former Chicago Sun-Times publisher who bought the struggling Orange Coast Daily Pilot and seven other small Southland newspapers last year and vowed to improve their operations, has been ousted as publisher and president of Page Group Publishing Inc.
Page said in a telephone interview Tuesday that he will fight the ouster. He filed one lawsuit last week against his partners, and they retaliated Monday by filing their own suit, firing him and evicting him from his office.
The legal fight and Page’s ouster cap several months of growing conflict with Page Group Chairman Elliot Stein Jr. over the company’s nearly $2-million purchase of a Spanish-language weekly last year.
Page, who owns 10% to 15% of Page Group, said he initially approved the acquisition of the Los Angeles-based paper, Tu Mundo, which means “Your World,” from a partnership that included Stein and movie moguls Jon Peters and Peter Guber. But he said he later came to believe that the weekly paper’s assets were artificially inflated and that the group had paid too much to acquire it.
Page Group is a holding company for several publications in Orange and Los Angeles counties: the Daily Pilot, the Glendale News Press, six weekly newspapers and two small monthly magazines.
Page came to Orange County in late 1989 after being forced out of the Sun-Times in a dispute with its board over falling circulation. He said at the time that he was excited about entering community journalism and was heading a group that intended to acquire “many” newspapers in a “tremendous market here that we haven’t even begun to tap.”
Page’s firing came after he sued Stein in Orange County Superior Court last week, alleging that Stein refused to grant him access to records involving the July, 1990, purchase of Tu Mundo.
An attorney for Page said Tuesday that Tu Mundo appears to have had assets of only $2,100 at the time it was purchased for $1.8 million.
Neither Stein nor Page Group’s new executive vice president, James Gressinger, responded to several requests for interviews.
