The Tribune Company, owner of the LA Times and Chicago Tribune, has filed for bankruptcy. Bummer. Pretty much everyone saw this coming. The company is $12 billion in debt, its revenues are going steadily downward, it's been having round after round of layoffs, and it's run by an angry (but honest!) billionaire gnome and a Ron Jeremy doppelganger of questionable sanity. Its papers will keep publishing, but working journalists are sure to get even more royally screwed before this is all over—their pension plan actually owns the company. Key details below:

The recession has an upside, right? As consumers cut back, austerity trend pieces told us chicken was supposed to supplant beef as what's for dinner. But Pilgrim's Pride, the large poultry producer, has gone bankrupt right after Thanksgiving.

When the Yellowstone Club filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, company execs were quick to reassure the clubs roster of billionaire moguls that the resort would remain open for the ski season. Now it looks like Bill Gates, Barry Sternlicht, Peter Chernin, Dan Quayle and the club's other members are going to need to find someplace else to spend Christmas vacation. Court filings indicate that the club doesn't have enough money to make monthly payroll, or even pay this month's food and electricity bills. What will happen? One suggestion: "Gates can just buy it and save the hassle of worrying about where to ski this winter." [WSJ]

The Daily News combed through Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy filing to see who was left holding the bag. Among the parties owed cash: the Ritz Carlton on Central Park South ($239,671), Equinox gyms ($354,653), Charge & Ride car service ($41,374), and a fire extinguisher repairman in Brooklyn. [NYDN]

Zvue, a maker of video players and operator of websites like eBaum's World and Dorks.com, has a post-Halloween deadline to make $1.9 million in payments to a hedge-fund lender. Also owed money: The company's chief technology officer, Carl Page, the older brother of Google cofounder Larry Page, who has loaned his employer at least $4.9 million, including $1 million in July. Could bankruptcy be in the cards? If so, it would be quite a reversal for the elder Page.A decade ago, Carl looked like the more successful brother, having sold eGroups, a company he cofounded, to Yahoo for $432 million. But Carl's efforts to repeat his success, and come anywhere close to Larry's, have made him a buffoon. Zvue shut down its San Francisco Web operations in July, leaving its collection of funny-if-you're-15-years-old websites to Eric Bauman, the creator of eBaum's World. Bauman is also owed millions by Zvue, for fare like "Ass Cream Vendor."

Lawyers at the firm Weil Gotshal will make as much as $950 an hour to work on the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the largest in U.S. history. The total bill for lawyers from three dozen different firms, hundreds of accountants, and countless financial advisers? Possibly as high as $1 billion. [Bloomberg via DB]

Erstwhile art dealer Larry Salander, whose gallery imploded last winter as a result of his extremely shady business practices, continues his plummet into disgrace: now people are underpaying for the carpets his creditors seized from him! As part of the liquidation of his estate, 300 of his antique carpets went up for auction at Tepper Galleries on East 25th Street on Friday. It was a bargain-hunter's dream: A social worker from Williamsburg walked away with a lovely 7-by-8 number with brown and ivory rosettes, and most lots sold for well below the bottom limit of their presale estimate. Looking to peck at the carcass of Salander's fortune yourself? His furniture and garden statuary is being auctioned off at Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York on June 7th.

Here's John Rogers. He's morally and financially bankrupt. He's a once-convicted felon with addiction problems and a taste for threatening strangers and lovers. And his dream is dead.

Ziff Davis Media, the publisher of PC Magazine and other tech magazines and websites, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy late yesterday. Its revenue from print has nosedived since the end of the tech boom, and it hasn't been able to make up for it yet online—like most other publishers. "We feel like we're in a position poised for wonderful growth," said ZD CEO Jason Young, being disingenuous to a heroic degree. "We just need to solve this issue." The issue being your whole business! Some perspective: Print revenue for ZD fell from $215 million in 2001 to $40 million in 07. Now they owe creditors about $200 million more than they have. In PR terms this known as a "restructuring." In real terms, a long and painful death. [AP, Paid Content]

Jason Young, CEO of technology publisher Ziff-Davis, couldn't solve the company's $225 million debt problem. That means a round-trip back to bankruptcy court, whiled it restructures yet again. What it has left to restructure is an utter mystery.

A tipster tells us top management at Pay By Touch, the biometrics payments firm run into the ground by felon John Rogers and now struggling in bankruptcy, has auctioned off its "core assets" in an attempt to pay off creditors. That may not be the case: On Friday, a party of creditors filed a restraining order with a court in Los Angeles to prevent management from "shutting down the operations of Pay By Touch Payment Solutions" — its main business. A shutdown, presumably, would only come after a failed attempt to sell the operation. How touching that someone still wants Pay By Touch to stay in business.

The news that Sharper Image, the San Francisco-based gadget-vending chain, has filed for bankruptcy has sparked a wave of premature nostalgia. Naive sorts think that Chapter 11 means a swift farewell to a company. Nothing of the sort. Sharper Image, buoyed by a loan from Wells Fargo, will stay open, continuing to hawk Ionic Breeze air purifiers while it sorts out its finances. Too bad. As a creative concern, Sharper Image went out of business long ago. It fired its founder, Richard Thalheimer in 2006, and is besieged by lawsuits; SF Weekly has an excellent retelling of that tale. The tragedy here is not that Sharper Image will soon roll up its windows; it's that it takes so long for a good idea gone bad to give up the ghost.

• Yahoo gets an NYT section cover story for, um, improving its ad program. Thrilling. [NYT]