what newspapers does alden global capital own

Heath hopes the well never runs dry, but hes going to keep pumping until it does. With aggressive cost-cutting, Alden can operate its newspapers at a profit for years while turning out a steadily worse product, indifferent to the subscribers its alienating. When he did, he exhibited a casual contempt for the journalists who worked there. More to the point, Tribune Publishingwhich represents a substantial portion of Aldens titleswas profitable at the time of the acquisition. When Simon called me, he was on the set of his new miniseries, We Own This City, which tells the true story of Baltimore cops who spent years running their own drug ring from inside the police department. When John Glidden first joined the Vallejo Times-Herald, in 2014, it had a staff of about a dozen reporters, editors, and photographers. After college he worked at Hudson Studio, Art Foundry in Niverville, NY . After congratulating him on closing the deal, Bainum said he was still interested in buying the Sun if Alden was willing to negotiate. Most responded with variations on the same question: Which recent stories from your newspapers have you especially appreciated? ), Crucially, the profits generated by Aldens newspapers did not go toward rebuilding newsrooms. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital will acquire the rest of what it does not already own of Tribune Publishing, owner of the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News and other local newspapers . Most of his investments are defined by a cold pragmatism, but he takes a more personal interest in the media sector. Nov. 22, 2021. It has filed a lawsuit in its bid to buy out news publisher Lee Enterprises. At one point, he told me, the citys entire civil-service commission was abruptly fired without explanation; his sources told him something fishy was going on, but he knew hed never be able to run down the story. But within weeks, Bainum said, Alden tried to tack on a five-year licensing deal that would have cost him tens of millions more. Somehow, no one's buying it. I would know he didnt mean it, and he would know he didnt mean it, but he would at least go through the motions. 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. [22] The appointees to the MediaNews board were replaced by new directors representing the stockholders group led by Alden Global Capital. Other large shareholders include Californian asset manager Capital Group and UK fund manager Jupiter Asset Management. 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. That gave the journalists at the Sun a brief window to stop the sale from going through. How exactly Randall Smith chose Heath Freeman as his protg is a matter of speculation among those who have worked for the two of them. The papers printing was moved to a plant more than 100 miles outside town, Glidden told me, which meant that the news arriving on subscribers doorsteps each morning was often more than 24 hours old. 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. . But this acquisition was profound, making Alden Global . Two veteran journalists from the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed on Sunday challenging one of the paper's principal owners, the New York hedge fund Alden Global Capital. 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. 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. A quarter of the newsroom (including many big-name reporters, columnists and photographers) took the buyouts Alden offered, and while some great reporters remain on staff, it's nearly impossible for them to fill those gaps, Coppins says. If you want to know what its like when Alden Capital buys your local newspaper, you could look to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where coverage of local elections in more than a dozen communities falls to a single reporter working out of his attic and emailing questionnaires to candidates. In conversations with former Alden employees, I heard repeatedly that their partnership seemed to transcend business. No response came back. Several interim executive positions were also filled by people related to Alden or its parent, Smith Management LLC.[23]. But beneath all the recriminations and infighting was a cruel reality: When faced with the likely decimation of the countrys largest local newspapers, most Americans didnt seem to care very much. It was all about the next quarters profit margins, says Matt DeRienzo, who worked as a publisher for Aldens Connecticut newspapers before finally resigning. As the months passed, things kept getting worse. Through it all, the owners maintained their ruthless silencespurning interview requests and declining to articulate their plans for the paper. Feb. 16, 2021 8:04 PM PT. 'Sobs, gasps, expletives' over latest Denver Post layoffs", "The Hedge Fund Vampire That Bleeds Newspapers Dry Now Has the Chicago Tribune by the Throat", "How Massive Cuts Have Remade The Denver Post", "Newsonomics: By selling to Americas worst newspaper owners, Michael Ferro ushers the vultures into Tribune", "A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms", "Affiliated Media Files for Bankruptcy to Restructure (Update2)", "The shakeup at MediaNews: Why it could be the leadup to a massive newspaper consolidation", "Alden Global Capital to buy Tribune in deal valued at $630 million", "Lee Enterprises Enacts Poison Pill to Guard Against Alden Takeover", "Lee Enterprises Board Rejects Alden's Acquisition Offer", "Alden Global Capital takes Lee Enterprises to court over failed board nominations", "Alden Global Capital sues Lee Enterprises after rejected takeover bid", "Alden Global Capital loses lawsuit to nominate its slate of candidates for Lee Enterprises' board", "Lee Enterprises shareholders reelect three directors amid hedge fund fight", "Tampa Bay Times sells printing plant to developer for $21 million", "A hedge fund's 'mercenary' strategy: Buy newspapers, slash jobs, sell the buildings", "The hedge fund trying to buy Gannett faces federal probe after investing newspaper workers' pensions in its own funds", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alden_Global_Capital&oldid=1130942589, This page was last edited on 1 January 2023, at 19:27. He says he visited the Tribune's office and was "really shocked by how grim the scene was." 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. They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think thats honestly a misnomer, Johnson said. A native of Vallejo, he was proud to work for his hometown paper. When Alden first got into the news business, Freeman seemed willing to indulge some innovation. By Julie Reynolds. It was clear that they didnt care about this being a business in the future. 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. Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. Freemans father, Brian, was a successful investment banker who specialized in making deals on behalf of labor unions. But it turned out that Smith had so many doorsteps16 mansions in Palm Beach alone, as of a few years ago, some of them behind gatesthat the plan proved impractical. A vulture doesnt hold a wounded animals head underwater. [13], In response, the board of Lee Enterprises enacted a shareholder rights plan, colloquially known as a "poison pill", in order to ward off the purchase attempt. Read: Local news is dying, and Americans have no idea, From 2015 to 2017, he presided over staff reductions of 36 percent across Aldens newspapers, according to an analysis by the NewsGuild (a union that also represents employees of The Atlantic). Interestingly, Smiths foundation didnt do well with its Alden investments in 2016. At their worst, they used their papers to maintain oppressive social hierarchies. Like many alumni of the Sun, Simon is steeped in the papers history. And everyone knows its going to run dry.. Even in a declining industry, the newspapers still generated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues; many of them were turning profits. Traditional newspaper business model says you make 95% of your money off ad sales and the rest off subscriptions. Prior to the buildings completion, McCormick directed his foreign correspondents to collect fragments of various historical sitesa brick from the Great Wall of China, an emblem from St. Peters Basilicaand send them back to be embedded in the towers facade. I asked. He was fired after criticizing Alden in a Washington Post interview. They are also defined by an obsessive secrecy. Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that owns The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press in Virginia, has proposed purchasing Lee Enterprises, the Iowa-based owner of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and most other major Virginia newspapers, for approximately $144 million, Alden announced Monday. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldnt manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the states undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter whod helped expose the governors offshore shell companies. Russ Smith is a puckish libertarian whose self-described contempt for the journalistic class animates the pages of the publication. Coppins offers several examples, like the Chicago Tribune and California's Vallejo Times-Herald. The show draws from a book written by a Sun reporter, and Simon was quick to point out that the paper still has good journalists covering important stories. [4] [5] The company added more newspapers to its portfolio in May 2021 when it purchased Tribune . So far, Alden has limited its closures primarily to weekly newspapers, but Doctor argues its only a matter of time before the firm starts shutting down its dailies as well. The rationale offered by the board was, Consistent with its fiduciary duties, Lees Board has taken this action to ensure our shareholders receive fair treatment, full transparency and protection in connection with Aldens unsolicited proposal to acquire Lee. Well, that wasnt the point. But when I emailed his studio looking for information, I was informed curtly that the photo was no longer available. Had Smith bought the rights himself? [3] [4] With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late . We were like, Theyre not going to take our newspaper from us! We dont hear from them Theyre, like, nameless, faceless people., In the months that followed, the Sun did not immediately experience the same deep staff cuts that other papers did. Meanwhile, in Vallejo, John Glidden went from covering crime and community news to holding the title of the only hard news reporter in town, filling a legal pad with tips he knew he'd never have time to pursue. [14], Alden has a reputation for sharply cutting costs by reducing the number of journalists working on its newspapers. The newspaper lost a quarter of its staff to buyouts after it was acquired by Alden Global Capital in May. Collectively, they control about one-half of daily newspapers in the U.S. The men who devised this model are Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital. Prior to the acquisition of the Tribune Company, we purchased substantially all of our newspapers out of bankruptcy or close to liquidation, he told me. The paper had weathered a decade and a half of mismanagement and declining revenues and layoffs, and had finally achieved a kind of stability. Reading these stories now has a certain horror-movie quality: You want to somehow warn the unwitting victims of whats about to happen. 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.

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