Financially, it was a raw deal. The Alden Global Capital . 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. The story of Alden Capital begins on the set of a 1960s TV game show called Dream House. 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. Coppins offers several examples, like the Chicago Tribune and California's Vallejo Times-Herald. Coordinated by . Glidden had heard rumblings about the papers owners when he first took the job, but he hadnt paid much attention. Meanwhile, reporters fanned out across their respective cities in search of benevolent rich people to buy their newspapers. The new owners had announced a round of buyouts, some beloved staffers were leaving, and those who remained were worried about the future. The practical effect of the death of local journalism is that you get what weve had, he told me, which is a halcyon time for corruption and mismanagement and basically misrule.. Scott Olson/Getty Images Hedge fund Alden Global Capital, one of the country's largest newspaper owners with a reputation for intense cost cuts and layoffs, has offered to buy the local newspaper chain Lee Enterprises for about $141 million. Who is investor Randall Smith and why is he buying up newspaper companies, deep losses to Alden funds overall values, Denver Post newsroom workers invoke Thirst Amendment to raise awareness about conditions under Alden, Pittsburgh newspaper workers are making history, The NewsGuild urges public pension funds to divest from Cerberus, NewsGuild to Lee Shareholders: Reject Aldens Vote No Campaign. I asked. 'Vulture' Fund Alden Global, Known For Slashing Newsrooms, Buys Tribune In its bid to acquire Tribune Publishing, the hedge fund Alden Global Capital vowed to provide $375 million in cash to the owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and other titles a . Like many alumni of the Sun, Simon is steeped in the papers history. 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. On the appointed afternoon, I dialed the number provided by his spokesperson and found myself talking to the most feared man in American newspapers. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith. For Smith, the Palm Beach conservative and Trump ally, sticking it to the mainstream media might actually be a perk of Aldens strategy. 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. The bid by Alden Global Capital, which already owns about 200 local newspapers, had faced resistance from Tribune staff and last-ditch competition. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. But Glidden felt sure he knew the real reason: Alden wanted him gone. Iowa-based Lee Enterprises asks investors to help fight off hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Orders for non-defence capital goods excluding aircraft a closely watched proxy for business investment, rose 0.8 per cent in January from a month earlier, comfortably above economists . Alden Global Capital revealed a proposal Monday to purchase Lee Enterprise Inc. and its newspapers at $24 a share, casting alarm through the many newsrooms owned by Lee. They want to know who exactly profits when we learn, as Harvard Nieman Labs Ken Doctor recently reported, that the firm netted $160 million last year from its Digital First Media newspapers. Tribune Publishing last month approved a $630m takeover deal with Alden Global Capital. In the Hyatt meeting, Ted Venetoulis, a former Baltimore politician, advised the reporters to pick a noisy public fight: Set up a war room, circulate petitions, hold events to rally the city against Alden. "And what we've seen in a lot of these places where newspapers have been scaled back or even closed is there really is no comparable product in place, whether it's by the government or by another news organization, to do what these local newspapers have done for hundreds of years.". 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. 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. Alden Global Capital, the Hedge Fund Killing Newspapers - The Atlantic Alden Global Capital aims to buy Lee Enterprises | The Gazette But for that to happen, the Big Tech money would need to flow to underfunded newsrooms, not into the pockets of Aldens investors. [4], In 2019, Alden attempted, but failed at, a hostile takeover of Gannett. Instead, they gutted the place. Already the largest shareholder . But that would require slow, painstaking workand there are easier ways to make money. Hedge fund Alden Global is buying newspaper chain Tribune Publishing So Freeman pivoted. Joe Pompeo pilloried Alden in Vanity Fair for reducing newsrooms. But he says the worst culprit is the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which bought the Mercury in 2011 and has since sold the paper's building and slashed newsroom staff by about 70%. Baltimore is an underdog town, Liz Bowie, a Sun reporter who was at the meeting, told me. For two men who employ thousands of journalists, remarkably little is known about them. Pioneer Press owner buys 11 more Minnesota papers - Star Tribune If accepted, the $24 per share purchase price would . When he did, he exhibited a casual contempt for the journalists who worked there. One known investor, however, is the Randall and Barbara Smith Foundation, named for Alden founder Smith and his wife. Coppins describes Alden as a specific type of firm: a "vulture hedge fund." Several interim executive positions were also filled by people related to Alden or its parent, Smith Management LLC.[23]. Its hard to imagine theyd show, anyway. Today, we know that Knight, CalPERS and others no longer invest with Alden. But if you really started fucking up in grandiose and belligerent ways, if you started stealing and grifting and lying, eventually somebody would come up behind you and say, Youre grifting and youre lying and theyd put it in the paper., The bad stuff runs for so long now, he went on, that by the time you get to it, institutions are irreparable, or damn near close., Take away the newsroom packed with meddling reporters, and a city loses a crucial layer of accountability. Bainum envisioned rebuilding the paperwhich, by 2020, was down to a single full-time statehouse reporteras a nonprofit. Yes, today, it's a newspaper without a newsroom. The scene was somehow even grimmer than Id imagined. 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. Alden, which has built a reputation as one of the newspaper industry's most aggressive cost-cutters, became Tribune Publishing's largest shareholder in November 2019 and owns a 31.3% stake. But in the case of local news, nothing comparable is ready to replace these papers when they die. Digital First Media - Wikipedia Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that owns the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News, offered to buy Lee Enterprises Inc. for about $142 million, seeking a larger share of the . Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. They could be vain, bumbling, even corrupt. Some of these papers likely would have been liquidated if the fund had not stepped in to buy them, as Alden's president told Coppins. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital in hunt for big newspaper chain Lee Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In May 2021, Tribune Publishing finalized its sale to Alden, after having announced in February 2021 that it intended to pursue this path. Its not the name or the flag., He may get his wish. But the group that jumps out to me on the list is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. [32], The company has been criticized for investing money for pensions of newspaper employees in funds it manages itself. Now he was feeling the effects of their management. So I was more than a little shocked to learn that, according to its tax filings, Knight had invested $13 million with Aldens Distressed Opportunities Fund by 2010 and kept investing through 2014. One acquaintance tells The Village Voice that hes the kind of guy who divests himself every couple of years to avoid ending up on lists of the worlds richest people. 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. [4], Alden purchased a 5.9-percent stake in Lee Enterprises in January 2020. My request for an interview with Smith was dismissed by his spokesperson before I finished asking. On Monday, Dail NPR reached out to Alden for a response. No response came back. 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 knew they almost never talked to reporters, but Randall Smith and Heath Freeman were now two of the most powerful figures in the news industry, and theyd gotten there by dismantling local journalism. 'Vulture' Fund Alden Global, Known For Slashing Newsrooms, Buys Tribune Papers, Stop The Presses! Lee Enterprises owns 77 daily newspapers, including the Buffalo News, Omaha World-Herald and the Tulsa World. Newspapers Have Been Struggling And Then Came The Pandemic - Forbes Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune these days, and youll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? A more honest argument might have claimed, as some economists have, that vulture funds like Alden play a useful role in creative destruction, dismantling outmoded businesses to make room for more innovative insurgents. The specific shareholder rights plan adopted by the Lee board forbids Alden from purchasing more than 10% of the company, and will be in force for one year. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital in hunt for Lee Enterprises newspaper Tampa Bay Times sells printing plant to developer for $21 million When the Smiths win, they pass on the house and take the cash prize insteada $20,000 haul that Randy will eventually use to seed a small trading firm he calls R.D. Aldens website contains no information beyond the firms name, and its list of investors is kept strictly confidential. Well, he told me, they have some very good reporters., This article appears in the November 2021 print edition with the headline The Men Who Are Killing Americas Newspapers., A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms, I Dont Know That I Would Even Call It Meth Anymore, W. G. Sebald Ransacked Jewish Lives for His Fictions. At one point, I tracked down the photographer whod taken the only existing picture of Smith on the internet. These papers were in many cases left for dead by local families not willing to make the tough but appropriate decisions to get these news organizations to sustainability. As a privately held hedge fund, Alden doesnt have to reveal much to the public. He was fired after criticizing Alden in a Washington Post interview. To find the papers current headquarters one afternoon in late June, I took a cab across town to an industrial block west of the river. When lawmakers pressed for details last year on who funds Alden, the company replied that there may be certain legal entities and organizational structures formed outside of the United States.. ", "Hedge Fund Reaches a Deal to Buy Tribune Publishing", "Opinion - Will The Chicago Tribune Be the Next Newspaper Picked to the Bone? Alden Global Capital has currently bid to buy all of Tribune. 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 . Inside Alden Global Capital. but sadly on a global scale there is hardly any independent news sources left currently. Around this time, Randy becomes preoccupied with privacy. MediaNews Group came out of bankruptcy in March 2010 under the majority ownership of its lenders. Smith. A group of 11 community newspapers owned by Red Wing Publishing Co. have been sold to MediaNews Group, owner of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and more than 100 newspapers across the country. This is the story weve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and its not without truth. Some have even suggested that this represents Americas last chance to save its local-news industry. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self. [2] [3] By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers. His editor cited a supposed journalistic infraction (Glidden had reported the resignation of a school superintendent before an agreed-upon embargo). Connecting this to the current state of American newspaper ownership seems rather tenuous.. What exactly went wrong would become a point of bitter debate among the journalists involved in the campaigns. One tagline he was considering was Marylands Best Newsroom., When I asked, half in jest, if he planned to raid the Sun to staff up, he responded with a muted grin. But years later, when Randy relocates to Palm Beach and becomes a major donor to Donald Trumps presidential campaign, it will make a certain amount of sense that his earliest known media investment was conceived as a giant middle finger to the journalistic establishment. Tuesday, 23 November 2021 07:46 PM EST. "[17] and Vanity Fair dubbed Alden the "grim reaper of American newspapers. "[25], In early December, the board of Lee unanimously rejected the Alden bid, saying that the Alden proposal "grossly undervalues Lee and fails to recognize the strength of our business today. They want to know who exactly profits when we learn, as Harvard Nieman Lab's Ken Doctor recently reported, that the firm netted $160 million last year from its Digital First Media . [33], Alden Global Capital's management of American newspapers has been criticized. In Orlando, the Sentinel ran an editorial pleading with the community to deliver us from Alden and comparing the hedge fund to a biblical plague of locusts. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, reporters held reader forums where they tried to instill a sense of urgency about the threat Alden posed to The Morning Call. [2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman. [29] This attempt also failed, as shareholders returned both directors to the Lee board despite Alden's opposition. MNG Enterprises, Inc., doing business as Digital First Media and MediaNews Group, is a Denver, Colorado -based newspaper publisher owned by Alden Global Capital. It's a tangled tale but essentially Asylum produced a film for the McDonald's charitable foundation for Leo. Another ex-publisher told me Freeman believed that local newspapers should be treated like any other commodity in an extractive business. But in the meantime, there isn't really anything that can fill the hole these newspapers will leave if they're shut down. Controversial hedge fund Alden Global wins bidding for Chicago Tribune Alden Global Looks to Buy Newspaper Publisher Lee Enterprises The 1% own and operate the . Alden Global Capital makes an offer for Lee Enterprises, a big But as an organization that believes that quality information is essential for individuals and communities to make their own bestchoices, it was disappointing that the foundation couldnt simply own up to its error in judgment when it came to Alden. 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 my many conversations with people who have worked with Freeman, not one could recall seeing him read a newspaper. The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of . Billionaires battle for Tribune Publishing | The Economist A vulture doesnt hold a wounded animals head underwater. But there was still a sliver of hope: Tribune and Alden agreed that the hedge fund would not increase its stake in the company for at least seven months. The Tribune Tower, the iconic former home of the Chicago Tribune, seen in Chicago, Illinois in 2015. He writes a weekly column called Mugger that savages the citys journalists by name and frequently runs to 10,000 words. The families that used to own the bulk of Americas local newspapersthe Bonfilses of Denver, the Chandlers of Los Angeleswere never perfect stewards. At their worst, they used their papers to maintain oppressive social hierarchies. qhhsubiquity.com Informacin detallada del sitio web y la empresa The purchase represents the culmination of Alden's years-long drive to take over the company and its storied titles . The question was how. Is this company saving newspapers or profiting from their demise? - The "[28], In mid-February 2022, the Delaware court found in favor of Lee Enterprises. Frustrated and worn out, Glidden broke down one day last spring when a reporter from The Washington Post called. ), Crucially, the profits generated by Aldens newspapers did not go toward rebuilding newsrooms. But for all the theatrics, his marching orders were always the same: Cut more. Hedge fund Alden Global is buying newspaper chain Tribune Publishing Meanwhile, the Tribunes remaining staff, which had been spread thin even before Alden came along, struggled to perform the newspapers most basic functions. Most responded with variations on the same question: Which recent stories from your newspapers have you especially appreciated? Local newsrooms strained by budget-slashing financial firms 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. "[26] Shortly thereafter, Alden Global, through its operating unit Strategic Investment Opportunities, filed a lawsuit in state court in Delaware against Lee Enterprises. Clearly, for Smith and Freeman, chop-shopping their newspapers paid off. What happens next? Reinventing their papers could require years of false starts and fine-tuningand, most important, a delayed payday for Aldens investors. Denver Post reporters vs 'vulture capitalist' hedge fund Alden - CNBC [4] [5] The company added more newspapers to its portfolio in May 2021 when it purchased Tribune . To replace a paper like the Sun would require a large, talented staff that covers not just government, but sports and schools and restaurants and art. When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. 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. One conclusions even these reporters are hesitant to make is that we are all dealing within a capitalist system which has none, or few, principles to guide itself, apart from making a profit, no matter how. When the journalists created a Slack channel to coordinate their efforts across multiple newspapers, they dubbed it Project Mayhem.. Hedge fund Alden to buy Tribune Publishing in deal valued at $630 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. Even as Aldens portfolio grew, Freeman rarely visited his newspapers. On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Alden Global Capital already owns 200 publications and a 6% stake in Lee Enterprises. Maybe theyd cancel their subscriptions eventually; maybe the papers would fold altogether. To be sure, the Knight Foundation does much to help promote and sustain local news. For Baltimore to avoid a similar fate, Simon told me, something new would have to come alonga spiritual heir to the Sun: A newspaper is its contents and the people who make it. It has not, however, retained the Chicago Tribune.
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