How it started
Print pioneer
The Tribune Company was founded on June 10, 1847 when the eponymous Chicago Daily Tribune published its first edition in a one-room plant located at LaSalle and Lake Streets in downtown Chicago. The original press run consisted of 400 copies printed on a hand press. The Tribune constructed its first building, a four-story structure at Dearborn and Madison Streets, in 1869. The building was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871, along with most of the city. The Tribune resumed printing two days later with an editorial declaring "Chicago Shall Rise Again." Joseph Medill, a native Ohioan who acquired an interest in the Tribune in 1855, gained full control of the newspaper in 1874 and ran it until his death in 1899.
Medill's two grandsons, cousins Robert R. McCormick and Joseph Medill Patterson, assumed leadership in 1911. That same year, the Chicago Tribune's first newsprint mill opened in Thorold, Ontario, Canada. The mill marked the beginnings of the Canadian newsprint producer later known as QUNO, in which Tribune held an investment interest until 1995.
Patterson established the company's second newspaper, the New York News in 1919. Tribune's ownership of the New York City tabloid was considered "interlocking" due to an agreement between McCormick and Patterson.
The paper launched a European edition during World War I. To compete with the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's in 1924, the Tribune Company launched a weekly national magazine, Liberty, run by a subsidiary, McCormick-Patterson.
Move into broadcasting
From Wikipedia’s article on Tribune Media, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3