Koch Industries, controlled by billionaires Charles and David of the same name, is now looking to expand their reach to the media, something new for the conglomerate.

Here’s the story from the New York Times:

Other than financing a few fringe libertarian publications, the Kochs have mostly avoided media investments. Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

By early May, the Tribune Company is expected to send financial data to serious suitors in what will be among the largest sales of newspapers by circulation in the country. Koch Industries is among those interested, said several people with direct knowledge of the sale who spoke on the condition they not be named. Tribune emerged from bankruptcy on Dec. 31 and has hired JPMorgan Chase and Evercore Partners to sell its print properties.

The papers, valued at roughly $623 million, would be a financially diminutive deal for Koch Industries, the energy and manufacturing conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., with annual revenue of about $115 billion.

Politically, however, the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic.

They’re not the only ones looking at the media properties. Here are a few more details from the Wall Street Journal:

The Kochs are among several parties that have shown interest in Tribune’s titles, the people said. Others include greeting-card magnate Aaron Kushner, who led a group that purchased the Orange County Register and six other Freedom Communications dailies last year. In an interview Sunday, Mr. Kushner reiterated his interest in a potential bid for all of the Tribune papers.

Koch Industries encompasses a vast array of mostly industrial businesses, from energy to paper milling, but to date has had little exposure to the media business.

The Koch brothers have been active funders of conservative causes such as the Americans for Prosperity political action committee, however, and Koch Industries has started its own website, KochFacts.com, to rebut what they see as inaccurate reporting about their activities.

Tribune, which emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at the end of last year, hired Evercore Partners and JP Morgan in February to explore the sale of its newspapers.

The sale process is still in preliminary stages. Financial information on the papers is expected to go out next month, say people familiar with the situation. Formal bids wouldn’t be expected until some time later.

A representative for Tribune said it “our long-standing policy is to decline to comment on any speculation involving the company or its media businesses.”

The Times said the main competitor for the Los Angeles Times is a local group:

Koch Industries’ main competitor for The Los Angeles Times is a group of mostly Democratic local residents. In the 2012 political cycle, Mr. Broad gave $477,800, either directly or through his foundation, to Democratic candidates and causes, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Mr. Burkle has long championed labor unions. President Bill Clinton served as an adviser to Mr. Burkle’s money management firm, Yucaipa Companies, which in 2012 gave $107,500 to Democrats and related causes. The group also includes Austin Beutner, a Democratic candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, and an investment banker who co-founded Evercore Partners.

“This will be a bipartisan group,” Mr. Beutner said. “It’s not about ideology, it’s about a civic interest.” (The Los Angeles consortium is expected to also include Andrew Cherng, founder of the Panda Express Chinese restaurant chain and a Republican.)

Apparently, the Tribune Co. is the preferred bidder for the newspapers, according to the New York Times:

At this early stage, the thinking inside the Tribune Company, the people close to the deal said, is that Koch Industries could prove the most appealing buyer. Others interested, including a group of wealthy Los Angeles residents led by the billionaire Eli Broad and Ronald W. Burkle, both prominent Democratic donors, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, would prefer to buy only The Los Angeles Times.

The Tribune Company has signaled it prefers to sell all eight papers and their back-office operations as a bundle. (Tribune, a $7 billion media company that also owns 23 television stations, could also decide to keep the papers if they do not attract a high enough offer.)

Koch Industries is one of the largest sponsors of libertarian causes — including the financing of policy groups like the Cato Institute in Washington and the formation of Americans for Prosperity, the political action group that helped galvanize Tea Party organizations and their causes. The company has said it has no direct link to the Tea Party.

A lot of the concern about the politicizing of the media reminds me of similar concerns voiced when Rupert Murdoch bought The Wall Street Journal. If people with the means are able to buy coverage or editorial page space, then there is the risk that others’ ideas won’t be covered.

Murdoch did institute changes to the structure of stories but not to coverage. Let’s hope that if the Koch brothers do win the Tribune properties, there won’t be any meddling in the editorial policies.

In a fun turn of events for technology reporters and Wall Street, Dish Network decided to put together a $25.5 billion bid for Sprint Nextel, offering a competing bid to Japanese Softbank’s.

Here are some of the details from the New York Times:

The pay-TV operator Dish Network said on Monday that it had submitted a $25.5 billion bid for Sprint Nextel.

The move is an attempt to scupper the planned takeover of Sprint Nextel by the Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank, which agreed in October to acquire a 70 percent stake in the American cellphone operator in a complex deal worth about $20 billion.

Dish Network thinks it can do better. Under the terms of its proposed bid, Dish Network said it was offering a cash-and-stock deal worth about 13 percent more than SoftBank’s bid.

Dish Network values its offer at $7 a share, including $4.76 in cash and the remainder in its shares. The offer is 12.5 percent above Sprint Nextel’s closing share price on Friday.

“The Dish proposal clearly presents Sprint shareholders with a superior alternative to the pending SoftBank proposal,” said Charles W. Ergen, Dish Network’s chairman.

Mr. Ergen said a “Dish/Sprint merger will create the only company that can offer customers a convenient, fully integrated, nationwide bundle of in- and out-of-home video, broadband and voice services.”

The Wall Street Journal put the latest move by Dish into great context in this piece:

The unsolicited offer is Mr. Ergen’s most audacious attempt yet to move from the slow-growing pay-television business into the fast-evolving wireless industry. The satellite TV pioneer eased into the industry by amassing spectrum and winning approval from regulators last year to use it to offer land-based mobile-phone service. But he lacks much of the rest of the operation, including a cellphone network, which would be costly and time-consuming to build.

Combining his company with Sprint would allow Dish to offer video, high-speed Internet and voice service across the country in one package whether people are at home or out and about, Mr. Ergen said. People who don’t have access to broadband from a cable company would be able to sign up for Internet service delivered wirelessly from Sprint cellphone towers to an antenna installed on their roof, Mr. Ergen said.

Taking over Sprint would be a big bite. The wireless carrier booked $35.3 billion in revenue last year, compared with $14.3 billion for Dish. The combined company would carry more than $36 billion in debt, according to CapitalIQ, even before loading on the $9 billion Dish indicated it would borrow to do the deal.

Dish said it would be able to execute a definitive merger agreement after reviewing Sprint’s books. The satellite company said it is being advised by Barclays, which is confident it can raise the funding.

Earlier this year, Dish made an informal offer to buy Clearwire Corp. —a wireless carrier that is half-owned by Sprint and that has agreed to sell Sprint the other half. Dish has yet to move forward with a formal bid.

Mr. Ergen said the “deck was stacked against us” with Clearwire due to a tangle of contractual obligations. With Sprint, the only obstacle is a $600 million breakup fee that would be due Softbank. He said he is willing to pay that.

Bloomberg Businessweek wrote a frequently asked questions piece, which offered this info on regulatory and David Einhorn’s position in Sprint:

Are there regulatory issues?
Probably not. Given the power of Verizon (VZ) andAT&T (T), analysts don’t expect a Dish, Sprint tie-up to hit anti-trust hurdles. On the contrary, Dish says the deal would be particularly good news for rural consumers who don’t have access to traditional broadband. If there’s anything FCC commissioners like, it’s rural consumers.

How about that David Einhorn? 
Right? Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital snapped up a bunch of Sprint shares as the company swooned in recent years. At the end of the first quarter last year, when Sprint shares were wallowing below $3, Greenlight had 68 million of them.

The Bloomberg wire story quoted an analyst as saying the deal had some merits despite the heavy debt load the potential company might hold:

The combined company will have an estimated $40 billion in debt, a heavy load, said Philip Cusick, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York. Still, the long-term synergies and cash generation make the idea “very compelling,” he said.

“The next question is the response from the Sprint board and whether Softbank comes back with another bid, potentially using its balance sheet advantage with more cash,” Cusick, who has a neutral rating on Dish, said in a report.

Dish’s offer extends a frenzy of consolidation for the U.S. wireless industry. Smaller carriers are seeking out merger partners to help wage a stronger attack against the two dominant competitors, Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc.

T-Mobile USA Inc., the fourth-largest U.S. carrier, is closing in on a merger with MetroPCS Communications Inc. (PSC), which is No. 5 in the industry. Deutsche Telekom AG (DTE), T-Mobile’s parent company, sweetened its offer for MetroPCS last week in order to get reluctant investors to agree to the terms.

It’s going to be interesting to see which deal the Sprint board selects and what reasons they offer for their choice. Dish obviously has grand ambitions and sees some part of Sprint playing into its plans. But does the Sprint board agree? Only time will tell.

There were two similar stories in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times on Thursday about the complexity of large financial firms and what they’re doing to simplify their structures.

The Journal story focused on the number of subsidiaries that many of the largest financial firms have and where they’re located.

Here’s the story:

Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive John Stumpf has described the bank’s business model as “meat and potatoes.” But the fourth-largest U.S. lender has 3,675 subsidiaries, up 8.6% from five years ago, according to an analysis provided to The Wall Street Journal by Swiss research firm Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing Inc.

Wells Fargo isn’t alone. In all, the six largest U.S. banks have 22,621 subsidiaries, according to the Journal’s analysis.

While that is down 18% in the past five years, regulators said they are getting frustrated with banks’ slow and uneven progress in streamlining their labyrinths of business units, offshore entities and other appendages.

Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry, whose agency oversees national banks, said in an interview that his staff intends to pay closer attention to “needless corporate complexity” and “whether it’s time to start cutting some of the brush out.”

The sprawling nature of the largest U.S. banks will be on display starting Friday, when Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase Co. report first-quarter financial results. A Wells Fargo spokesman declined to comment on the data provided by Bureau van Dijk “because we do not know its methodology” and said its filings show subsidiaries down by 23% since the end of 2008, to 1,361. The number of legal entities “is not an indicator of risk and Wells Fargo has a long track record of prudent risk management in all our businesses.”

Complexity in the banking sector has vexed regulators since the financial crisis, when troubles at big U.S. firms quickly spread throughout global markets. The U.S. government intervened to prop up the largest firms, prompting calls to break up those deemed “too big to fail.”

Regulators have introduced rules requiring banks to maintain a fatter financial cushion against losses than other institutions, accept strict limits on the biggest banks’ exposure to one another and submit a new set of plans showing how they would be unwound in the crisis.

And according to the Times, some of the largest firms are shifting assets and risk to other parts of the market, which may cause regulators to have a skewed picture of their capital.

Banks have been shedding risky assets to show regulators that they are not as vulnerable as they were during the financial crisis. In some cases, however, the assets don’t actually move — the bank just shifts the risk to another institution.

This trading sleight of hand has been around Wall Street for a while. But as regulators press for banks to be safer, demand for these maneuvers — known as capital relief trades or regulatory capital trades — has been growing, especially in Europe.

Citigroup, Credit Suisse and UBS have recently completed such trades. Rather than selling the assets, potentially at a loss, the banks transfer a slice of the risk associated with the assets, usually loans. The buyers are typically hedge funds, whose investors are often pensions that manage the life savings of schoolteachers and city workers. The buyers agree to cover a percentage of losses on these assets for a fee, sometimes 15 percent a year or more.

The loans then look less worrisome — at least to the bank and its regulator. As a result, the bank does not need to hold as much capital, potentially improving profitability.

Some regulators say they are concerned that in some instances these transactions are not actually taking risk off bank balance sheets. For instance, a financial institution may end up lending money to clients so they can invest in one of these trades, a move that could leave a bank with even more risk on its books.

Critics point to other reasons to worry. Most of these trades are structured as credit-default swaps, a derivative that resembles insurance. These kinds of swaps pushed the insurance giant American International Group to the brink of collapse in September 2008. Another red flag is that banks often use special-purpose vehicles located abroad, frequently in the Cayman Islands, to structure these trades.

Both these stories, while different in focus and tone, tackle the complicated issue of simplifying the banks and determining if they’re making progress toward complying with new laws. As the rules continue to be shaped, coverage of the banks and if they’re working to prevent a collapse will be increasingly important and likely to go on for years.