New owner of Arizona paper cuts newsroom

Veteran free-daily publisher Randy Miller wasted no time to cut costs after receiving a bankruptcy judge's approval to buy the East Valley Tribune in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa. The Phoenix Business Journal says Miller laid off roughly two dozen people in the Tribune's newsroom, leaving a staff of 14. Miller is the former publisher of the Colorado Daily in Boulder and currently owns the Telluride (Colorado) Daily Planet and Tucson's alt-weekly, The Explorer. He bought the Tribune from Freedom Communicationsn of Irvine, Calif. The deal reportedly included presses Freedom installed a couple of years ago for $4 million.