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Connecting this to the current state of American newspaper ownership seems rather tenuous.. Clearly, for Smith and Freeman, chop-shopping their newspapers paid off. Now he was feeling the effects of their management. The men killing Americas newspapers, how Slack upended the workplace, and the new meth. The Denver Post has become the face of this struggle, due to an editorial published in its own pages lashing out against owners, New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Located in the same Manhattan office building as Alden, it funds stem-cell research, health-related charities, arts and culture and Duke University, alma mater of Smiths protg Heath Freeman. But most of them also had a stake in the communities their papers served, which meant that, if nothing else, their egos were wrapped up in putting out a respectable product. What most concerns him is how his city will manage without a robust paper keeping tabs on the people in charge. But the group that jumps out to me on the list is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. At the same time, he increased subscription prices in many markets; it would take awhile for subscribersmany of them older loyalists who didnt carefully track their billsto notice that they were paying more for a worse product. Or to Denver, where the Posts staff was cut by two-thirds, evicted from its newsroom, and relocated to a plant in an area with poor air quality, where some employees developed breathing problems. It makes me profoundly sad to think about what the Trib was, what it is, and what its likely to become, says David Axelrod, who was a reporter at the paper before becoming an adviser to Barack Obama. Financially, it was a raw deal. . With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing earlier this year, Alden now controls more than 200 newspapers, including some of the countrys most famous and influential: the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the New York Daily News. It turned out that those ownersNew York hedge funders whom Glidden took to calling the lizard peoplewere laser-focused on increasing the papers profit margins. That's because the fund is stepping in to buy and then gut newsrooms across the country. The editor in chief mysteriously resigned, and managers scrambled to deal with the cuts. In 2016 (year of the most recent 990 available), the foundation invested $17 million in Alden funds. Even in the greed is good climate of the era, Randy is a polarizing character on Wall Street. One early article, in the trade publication Poynter, suggested that Aldens interest in the local-news business could be seen as flattering and quoted the owner of The Denver Post as saying he had enormous respect for the firm. Its a game, Randy explains to his son. Maybe theyd cancel their subscriptions eventually; maybe the papers would fold altogether. . (Freeman has, in the past, disputed Bainums account of the negotiations.) Alden Global Capital already owns 200 publications and a 6% stake in Lee Enterprises. By the time the FBI caught them, in 2017, the conspiracy had resulted in one dead civilian and a rash of wrongful arrests and convictions. Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. But a sense of fatalism permeated the work. Module 5- Journalism.pdf - Journalism Modules - The 5 Ws Alden Global Capital has currently bid to buy all of Tribune. [31], In 2019, Twenty Lake Holdings reported that it had acquired about 180 properties with 2.3 million square feet of real estate in 29 states. One researcher tells me that if that money were invested in the S&P 500 Index Fund, it would have earned roughly $11 million over the same period. To him, its the same as oil, the publisher said. Opinions - Help yourself. Is it ever okay to nick an idea? That might sound like a losing formula, but these papers dont have to become sustainable businesses for Smith and Freeman to make money. Hedge fund known for cutting journalism jobs is seeking to buy - CNN [11], In November 2021, Alden Global Capital made an offer to purchase Lee Enterprises for $24 a share in cash, or about $141 million. But while its true that Alden entered the industry by purchasing floundering newspapers, not all of them were necessarily doomed to liquidation. Those that have survived are smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable to acquisition. He stops talking to the press, refuses to be photographed, and rarely appears in public. A native of Vallejo, he was proud to work for his hometown paper. This summer, Alden Global Capital acquired Tribune Publishing and its titles, from small community newspapers to major metro titles like its flagship, The Chicago Tribune, and The Baltimore Sun. But by 2014, it was becoming clear to Aldens executives that Patons approach would be difficult to monetize in the short term, according to people familiar with the firms thinking. For Freeman and his investors to come out ahead, they didnt need to worry about the long-term health of the assetsthey just needed to maximize profits as quickly as possible. Hedge fund Alden in hunt for another big newspaper chain - WKMG I asked Knight about those investments and whether the Foundations officers had any regrets, knowing what we now do about Aldens devastating effect on its own newspapers. Eventually he was the only news reporter left on staff, charged with covering the citys police, schools, government, courts, hospitals, and businesses. "[34], In October 2021, The Atlantic examined the impact of Alden's acquisition of the Chicago Tribune, noting that, "The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. And when Chicago suffered a brutal summer crime wave, the paper had no one on the night shift to listen to the police scanner. When John Glidden first joined the Vallejo Times-Herald, in 2014, it had a staff of about a dozen reporters, editors, and photographers. Alden Global Capital already had a 32% stake in Tribune Publishing, which owns famous names like the Tribune, Daily News, the Hartford Courant and others, and on Tuesday announced it would pay . The newspaper lost a quarter of its staff to buyouts after it was acquired by Alden Global Capital in May. The paper had weathered a decade and a half of mismanagement and declining revenues and layoffs, and had finally achieved a kind of stability. , From the February 1905 issue: The confessions of a newspaper woman, The papers union hired a PR firm to launch a public-awareness campaign under the banner Save Our Sun and published a letter calling on the Tribune board to sell the paper to local owners. The Tribune Company (which owns the newspapers mentioned above) was still turning a profit when Alden bought it, but the hedge fund immediately offered aggressive rounds of buyouts and shrunk its newsrooms in the name of increasing profit margins. Im repulsed by the incestuous world of New York journalism, he tells New York magazine. If accepted, the $24 per share purchase price would . At one point, I tracked down the photographer whod taken the only existing picture of Smith on the internet. A month after he started, one of his fellow reporters left and Glidden was asked to start covering schools in addition to his other responsibilities. In 2011, Paton launched an ambitious initiative he called Project Thunderdome, hiring more than 50 journalists in New York and strategically deploying them to supplement short-staffed local newsrooms. Who Profits From Alden Global Capital? You'd be surprised. [27] The Alden lawsuit asserts that the members of the Lee board "have every reason to maintain the status quo and their lucrative corporate positions" and that they are "focused more on [their] own power than what's best for the company. Coppins describes Alden as a specific type of firm: a "vulture hedge fund." Tribune Sale to Alden Approved by Shareholders - The New York Times Bainum told me hed come to appreciate local journalism in the 1970s while serving in the Maryland state legislature. [3] [4] With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late . John Temple: My newspaper died 10 years ago. Dec 9, 2021. A young man named Randall Duncan SmithRandy for shortstands next to his wife, Kathryn, answering quick-fire trivia questions in front of a live studio audience. According to Aldens scarce SEC filings, it currently has fewer than 10 investors, most of them from overseas. But who most of those few souls are, and how much of the hundreds of millions skimmed from DFM papers theyve received remains a deep, dark mystery. But within weeks, Bainum said, Alden tried to tack on a five-year licensing deal that would have cost him tens of millions more. In the for-profit news arena, Knight is spurring the digital transformation of local newsrooms through the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, Sherry said. A vulture doesnt hold a wounded animals head underwater. He told me it will begin with an annual operating budget of $15 million, unprecedented for an outfit of this kind. During its five-year run with Alden, it seems quite unlikely that no one at Knight knew about the hedge funds slash-and-burn strategy for two reasons. For Smith, the Palm Beach conservative and Trump ally, sticking it to the mainstream media might actually be a perk of Aldens strategy. Iowa-based Lee Enterprises asks investors to help fight off hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. He scores big with a bankrupt aerospace manufacturer, and again with a Dallas-based drilling company. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. Many of the operators were looking at the newspaper business as a local advertising business, he said, and we didnt believe that was the right way to look at it. From the March 1914 issue: H. L. Mencken on newspaper morals, A story circulated throughout the companypossibly apocryphal, though no one could say for surethat when Freeman was informed that The Denver Post had won a Pulitzer in 2013, his first response was: Does that come with any money?. In May 2021, Tribune Publishing finalized its sale to Alden, after having announced in February 2021 that it intended to pursue this path. If they did it right, Venetoulis said, they just might be able to line up a local, civic-minded owner for the paper. Convinced that the Sun wont be able to provide the kind of coverage the city needs, he has set out to build a new publication of record from the ground up. If you went into a lab to create the perfect bro, Heath would be that creation, says one former executive at an Alden-owned company, who, like others in this story, requested anonymity to speak candidly. Alden Global Capital swallowed all of the Tribune's newspapers, including the New York Daily News, earlier in 2021. Freeman, meanwhile, would later gloat to colleagues that Bainum was never serious about buying the newspapers and just wanted to bask in the worshipful media coverage his bid generated. Well, that wasnt the point. Its not as if the Tribune is just withering on the vine despite the best efforts of the gardeners, Charlie Johnson, a former Metro reporter, told me after the latest round of buyouts this summer. In the face of that setback, Alden said it would turn to the tactic of filing a proxy statement asking the company's shareholders to vote no on board members Mary Junck and Herbert Moloney during the March 2022 board elections. When The New York Times profiles him in 1991, it notes that he excels at profiting from other peoples misery and quotes a parade of disgruntled clients and partners. Earnest and unpolished, with a perpetually mussed mop of hair, Bainum presented himself as a contrast to the cutthroat capitalists at Alden. Alden Global to buy Tribune Publishing for $630 million - Los Angeles Times It wasn't the first newspaper acquisition for this hedge fund firm, nor is it the only firm of its kind eyeing the nation's newspapers. Read: What we lost when Gannett came to town. Pioneer Press owner buys 11 more Minnesota papers - Star Tribune Many in the journalism industry, watching lawsuits play out in Australia and Europe, have held out hope in recent years that Google and Facebook will be compelled to share their advertising revenue with the local outlets whose content populates their platforms. Alden Global Capital pushes to reshape Lee Enterprises board Have you heard of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital? This was the core of Freemans argument. Glidden, then a mild-mannered 30-year-old, had come to journalism later in life than most and was eager to prove himself. Next year, Bainum will launch The Baltimore Banner, an all-digital, nonprofit news outlet. He gained 100 pounds and started grinding his teeth at night. The Tribune Tower, the iconic former home of the Chicago Tribune, seen in Chicago, Illinois in 2015. I felt like a terrible reporter because I couldnt get to everything.. We must finally require the online tech behemoths, such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, to fairly compensate us for our original news content, he told me. This once-proud publication is now owned and run by Alden Global Capital, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund with a long record of buying papers on the cheap, selling off their assets and slashing pay and jobs.

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