Puerto Rico’s struggling Spanish-language newspaper El Vocero has a survival strategy to avoid becoming yet another victim of the consolidation wave sweeping the media industry, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. Attorneys who put the daily newspaper into bankruptcy in September want to sell it but with a controversial restriction: they want the power to throw out bids from investors who already own other newspapers on the island. That proposed rule, which needs approval from a bankruptcy judge, would block offers from the influential Ferre family that controls the competing El Nuevo Dia newspaper, preventing them from buying El Vocero and either shutting it down or creating “an illegal monopoly,” said El Vocero president Peter Miller in court papers.
