To industry observers, Aldens brazen model set it apart even from chains like Gannett, known for its aggressive cost-cutting. | Michael Gray, WIkimedia Commons. At their worst, they used their papers to maintain oppressive social hierarchies. Its being snuffed out, quarter after quarter after quarter. We were sitting in a coffee shop in Logan Square, and he was still struggling to make sense of what had happened. As a reporter who's covered Alden Global Capital for more than two years, people often ask me who are the investors behind the hedge fund that owns one of America's largest newspaper chains?. Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund known for gutting local newsrooms, is seeking to buy Lee Enterprises (LEE), a publicly traded company with a chain of daily newspapers and other publications . "[28], In mid-February 2022, the Delaware court found in favor of Lee Enterprises. [4] [5] The company added more newspapers to its portfolio in May 2021 when it purchased Tribune . Glidden, then a mild-mannered 30-year-old, had come to journalism later in life than most and was eager to prove himself. 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. He declined to meet me in person or to appear on Zoom. Lee Enterprises holds off an Alden takeoverfor now 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. That gave the journalists at the Sun a brief window to stop the sale from going through. Alden Global Capital Is Killing the Newsroom - Common Dreams Freeman was more animated when he turned to the prospect of extracting money from Big Tech. These papers would have been liquidated if not for us stepping up.. At the end of last month, Alden Global Capital, a notorious newspaper-owning hedge fund, sought to stake its claim on one of the last newspaper chains it hasn't yet touched: Lee Enterprises, which owns 90 publications across the country.Alden, which currently owns six percent of Lee's stock, sent an unsolicited offer to purchase the newspaper chain for $24 per share. The men who devised this model are Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital. 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. When I asked Freeman what he thought was broken about the newspaper industry, he launched into a monologue that was laden with jargon and light on insightsummarizing what has been the conventional wisdom for a decade as though it were Aldens discovery. The Tribune Tower, the iconic former home of the Chicago Tribune, seen in Chicago, Illinois in 2015. The Hedge Fund Vampire That Bleeds Newspapers Dry Now Has the It played with my mind a little bit, Glidden told me. 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. 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. 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. After a long walk down a windowless hallway lined with cinder-block walls, I got in an elevator, which deposited me near a modest bank of desks near the printing press. 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. AP. The pitch had a certain romantic appeal to the reporters in the room. Tribune shareholders approve takeover by Alden Global Capital It's newspaper-endorsement season again, and that means it's Should newspapers do endorsements?season again. Freeman, his 41-year-old protg and the president of the firm, would be unrecognizable in most of the newsrooms he owns. [10] With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late May 2021, Alden is collectively the second-largest owner of newspapers in the United States, as calculated by average daily print circulation, second only to Gannett. If you're a reader of local newspapers particularly the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun or New York Daily News you're going to want to make sure the answer is yes. But that would require slow, painstaking workand there are easier ways to make money. [4][13], In November 2021, Alden made an offer to Lee to purchase the company in its entirety for roughly $141 million. Hedge fund Alden Global is buying newspaper chain Tribune Publishing Alden Global Capital owns 56 dailies under Digital First Media (Alden also owns 32% of Tribune 10 dailies in Column C.) Tribune Media owns 10 dailies. This is a subscription-based business.. Reinventing their papers could require years of false starts and fine-tuningand, most important, a delayed payday for Aldens investors. Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. by Magnus Shaw..An enormous advertising company (Leo Burnett) and a small creative film company (Asylum) have had a difficult couple of weeks. At the time, even savvy media insiders like Martin Langeveld wistfully predicted Alden would keep newspapers future in mind: Smith knows that the only way to win his big bet on the future of newspapers is to turn them into nimble, modern digital news enterprises.. In recent months, hes been meeting with leaders of local-news start-ups across the countryThe Texas Tribune, the Daily Memphian, The City in New Yorkand collecting best practices. When plans for the building were announced in 1922, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime owner of the Chicago Tribune, said he wanted to erect the worlds most beautiful office building for his beloved newspaper. Its World War II correspondent brought firsthand news of Nazi concentration camps to American readers; its editorial page had the power to make or break political careers in Maryland. Who Profits From Alden Global Capital? 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. 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. He had spoken on this issue before, and it was easy to see why. Glidden had heard rumblings about the papers owners when he first took the job, but he hadnt paid much attention. Since Alden's . He told me it will begin with an annual operating budget of $15 million, unprecedented for an outfit of this kind. You have no way of knowing that if you dont have some nosy son of a bitch asking a lot of questions down there, he told me. But while its true that Alden entered the industry by purchasing floundering newspapers, not all of them were necessarily doomed to liquidation. In a press release Monday, Nov. 22, 2021 Alden said it sent Lee's board a letter with the offer. Today, half of all daily newspapers in the U.S. are controlled by financial firms, according to an analysis by the Financial Times, and the number is almost certain to grow. Reading these stories now has a certain horror-movie quality: You want to somehow warn the unwitting victims of whats about to happen. Alden Global to buy Tribune Publishing for $630 million - Los Angeles Times A reporter at one of his newspapers suggested I try doorstepping Smithshowing up at his home unannounced to ask questions from the porch. But there are some clues here and there. Alden Global Capital is a hedge fund based in Manhattan, New York City. About a month after The Baltimore Sun was acquired by Alden, a senior editor at the paper took questions from anxious reporters on Zoom. Hedge fund Alden Global is buying newspaper chain Tribune Publishing 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. 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, in a . A Cornell grad with an M.B.A., Randy is on a partner track at Bear Stearns, where hes poised to make a comfortable fortune simply by climbing the ladder. These include the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and The Baltimore Sun. 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 is a hedge fund based in Manhattan, New York City. A century later, the Tribune Tower has retained its grandeur. Alden's holdings already spanned the country, including the . Freeman was only slightly more accessible. It . If they did it right, Venetoulis said, they just might be able to line up a local, civic-minded owner for the paper. Hedge fund reaches $630m deal to buy remaining Tribune Publishing A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms. But for Simon, that paper exists entirely in the past. qhhsubiquity.com Informacin detallada del sitio web y la empresa Aldens website contains no information beyond the firms name, and its list of investors is kept strictly confidential. In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. On the appointed afternoon, I dialed the number provided by his spokesperson and found myself talking to the most feared man in American newspapers. Alden Global Capital makes offer for Lee Enterprises, owner of Winston But whats happening in Chicago is different. 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. He studied art at Alfred University under sculptors Glenn Zweygardt and William Parry. When Alden first started buying newspapers, at the tail end of the Great Recession, the industry responded with cautious optimism. He was fired after criticizing Alden in a Washington Post interview. But Glidden felt sure he knew the real reason: Alden wanted him gone. 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. The New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital - known for slashing its newspapers' budgets to extract escalated profits - won shareholder approval Friday for its $633 million bid to acquire the Tribune Publishing newspaper chain.. 'Vulture' Fund Alden Global, Known For Slashing Newsrooms, Buys - NPR I sort of bully people around to get stuff done, he boasted to The Washington Post in 1985. As a reporter whos covered Alden Global Capital for more than two years, people often ask me who are the investors behind the hedge fund that owns one of Americas largest newspaper chains? The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of Gothic spires and flying buttresses that were designed to exude power and prestige. Alden began its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in 2019, when they paid $117.9 million to Michael Ferro for his 25.2-percent stake. Former Knight-Ridder headquarters. It hurts to see the paper like this, he told her. Coppins describes Alden as a specific type of firm: a "vulture hedge fund." The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the 2016 election in places with limited access to local news. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith. Alden completed its takeover of the Tribune papers in May. No response came back. It is the nations second-largest newspaper owner by circulation. My request for an interview with Smith was dismissed by his spokesperson before I finished asking. 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.. On March 9, 2020, a small group of Baltimore Sun reporters convened a secret meeting at the downtown Hyatt Regency. Like many alumni of the Sun, Simon is steeped in the papers history. This company that owns us now seems to still be prettyI dont even know how to put it, the editor said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Atlantic. [4][5] The company added more newspapers to its portfolio in May 2021 when it purchased Tribune Publishing and became the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States. Alden Global Capital is buying and gutting local newspapers : NPR - NPR.org 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. In early 2011, Alden was still considered a non-controlling investor, but by the end of the year, that would change. But in the meantime, there isn't really anything that can fill the hole these newspapers will leave if they're shut down. That's because the fund is stepping in to buy and then gut newsrooms across the country. Tuesday, 23 November 2021 07:46 PM EST. 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. but sadly on a global scale there is hardly any independent news sources left currently. 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.