Today in business: 5 things you need to know

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last updated 11 January 2015

1. TRIBUNE TO SPEND $2.73 BILLION ON LOCAL TV

Tribune Co. agreed to buy all 19 of Local TV Holdings LLC's television stations for $2.73 billion, the largest deal of its kind since 2000. Tribune will now own 42 stations, making it the biggest station-owning company in the U.S. "Our investment thesis is simple: scale matters," said Tribune CEO Peter Liguori. "Clearly, on an industry front, there is an acceleration of consolidation, and that's to be expected. We're a mature business, and mature businesses witness levels of consolidation." [The Wall Street Journal]

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Sixty percent of the 1,500 new stores Starbucks plans to build in the next five years will be drive-thrus — a good portion of which will be made out of old shipping containers, a green construction material that more and more blue chip companies are using to build stores. "The container is no longer a fad," said the CEO of SG Blockes, a company that converts retired shipping containers into building material. "It's a mainstream instrument of construction." [Fortune]

In March, the Scottish government approved plans to build a wind farm on the Scottish highlands a few miles north of Aberdeen, part of an initiative to generate the equivalent of all of Scotland's electricity consumption with renewable energy sources by 2020. The deal was news to Donald Trump, who was planning to spend hundreds of millions to build a resort which would overlook the dunes where the turbines will stand. "Wind farms are a disaster for the environment," he said. "They kill the birds. They are very expensive in terms of energy. They're made in China." Now, Trump is suing the Scottish government to have the March decision overturned. [NPR]

A new study by Pertino, a cloud networking software company, found that over half of Americans regularly check in with work while on vacation, and 36 percent have actually worked while lounging on the beach. These days, employees are doing more than just emailing colleagues. "The Information Age has enabled unprecedented levels of employee productivity from the corner office to the factory floor, but it has also created a dependency on the applications, files, and data that employees depend on every day to get their job done," said Pertino's president. "This can actually lead to anxiety when an employee is disconnected for a protracted period of time.” [The Christian Science Monitor]

Africa's richest man, Aliko Dangote, has teamed up with Nigeria's central bank to open a $25 million tomato paste factory — an operation that could be a boon for the country's more than 8,000 tomato farmers. A 2011 study commissioned by Nigeria's central bank showed the country spends $360 million on importing more than 300,000 metric tons of tomato paste from China each year, while the country produces 1.5 million tons of tomatos, of which about 900,000 tons rot. With Dangote's factory, the central bank said that farmers will receive a guaranteed price of about $700 per ton sold, compared to an average of less than $350 now. [Bloomberg]

Carmel Lobello is the business editor at TheWeek.com. Previously, she was an editor at DeathandTaxesMag.com.

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