what newspapers does alden global capital own what newspapers does alden global capital own

'Vulture' Fund Alden Global, Known For Slashing Newsrooms, Buys Tribune Papers, Stop The Presses! Freeman, his 41-year-old protg and the president of the firm, would be unrecognizable in most of the newsrooms he owns. The pay was terrible and the work was not glamorous, but Glidden loved his job. Coppins notes that there's even some research indicating that city budgets increase as a result, because corruption and dysfunction can take hold without a newspaper to hold powerful people to account. Several years later, when Heath was still in his mid-20s, Smith co-founded Alden Global Capital with him, and eventually put him in charge of the firm. 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? Alden is in the business of making money, not journalism. Rapid-fire changes underway at newspapers sold to cost-slashing hedge fund Alden Global Capital have led to a profound case of the jitters at newsrooms like the New York Daily News. 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). You need real capital to move the needle, he told me. Meanwhile, with few newsroom jobs left to eliminate, Alden continued to find creative ways to cut costs. They had a father-figure relationship, one told me. It . For Freeman, newspapers are financial assets and nothing morenumbers to be rearranged on spreadsheets until they produce the maximum returns for investors. Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. But there are some clues here and there. 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. NPR reached out to Alden for a response. 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. [7][8] Alden's purchase price was $635 million, or $17.25 per share. Former Knight-Ridder headquarters. He had spoken on this issue before, and it was easy to see why. 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. 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. Layout design was outsourced to freelancers in the Philippines. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. They could be vain, bumbling, even corrupt. People who know him described Freemanwith his shellacked curls, perma-stubble, and omnipresent smirkas the archetypal Wall Street frat boy. Alden, which took Chicago-based newspaper chain Tribune Publishing private in May, said it made a proposal to buy Lee for $24 a share in cash, a 30% premium to Friday's closing price for . 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. At the Suns peak, it employed more than 400 journalists, with reporters in London and Tokyo and Jerusalem. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you . 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. He teaches his 8-year-old son, Caleb, to make trades on a Quotron computer, and imparts the value of delayed gratification by reportedly postponing his familys Christmas so that he can use all their available cash to buy stocks at lower prices in December. Eventually he was the only news reporter left on staff, charged with covering the citys police, schools, government, courts, hospitals, and businesses. 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. But that would require slow, painstaking workand there are easier ways to make money. This is a subscription-based business.. At the Pioneer Press , where its staff is down to 60, the paper produced a . Am I going to win against capitalism in America? 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. When Alden first got into the news business, Freeman seemed willing to indulge some innovation. The Ubiquity - The student news site of Quartz Hill High School 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. [2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman. The story of Alden Capital begins on the set of a 1960s TV game show called Dream House. Alden Global Capital has currently bid to buy all of Tribune. 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. What happens next? Since Alden's . Morale tanked; reporters burned out. When the city-hall reporter left a few months later, he picked up that beat too. To David Simon, the whimpering end of The Baltimore Sun feels both inevitable and infuriating. Alden Global Capital, the New York hedge fund that bought Tribune Publishing this year, said on Monday that it was making an offer for another big American newspaper chain, Lee . These include the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and The Baltimore Sun. 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. After a contentious presidential race and amid a still-raging pandemic, there was a limited supply of outrage and sympathy to spare for local reporters. [10][19][20], The company has its origins in R.D. But outside the industry, few seemed to notice. 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. These were not exactly boom times for newspapers, after allat least someone wanted to buy them. They are also defined by an obsessive secrecy. It played with my mind a little bit, Glidden told me. When Alden first started buying newspapers, at the tail end of the Great Recession, the industry responded with cautious optimism. He gained 100 pounds and started grinding his teeth at night. The hollowing-out of the Chicago Tribune was noted in the national press, of course. 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. That might sound like a losing formula, but these papers dont have to become sustainable businesses for Smith and Freeman to make money. [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. Unless the Tribunes trajectory changes, Chicago may soon provide a grim case study. Reading these stories now has a certain horror-movie quality: You want to somehow warn the unwitting victims of whats about to happen. It's traded in a prestigious downtown newsroom for a "Chipotle-sized office" near the printing press. Other large shareholders include Californian asset manager Capital Group and UK fund manager Jupiter Asset Management. [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. 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. "A lot of cities almost operate with the assumption that there will be at least one local newspaper, in some cases several local newspapers, acting as a check on the authorities," he says. As a young man, hed studied at divinity school before taking over his fathers company, and decades later he still carried a healthy sense of noblesse oblige. Russ Smith is a puckish libertarian whose self-described contempt for the journalistic class animates the pages of the publication. Heath Freeman in an undated photo provided by Goldin Solutions . So who is investing with them? Glidden had heard rumblings about the papers owners when he first took the job, but he hadnt paid much attention. "[28], In mid-February 2022, the Delaware court found in favor of Lee Enterprises. On the appointed afternoon, I dialed the number provided by his spokesperson and found myself talking to the most feared man in American newspapers. Youd be surprised. Im worried the worst is yet to come. 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. 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. When John Glidden first joined the Vallejo Times-Herald, in 2014, it had a staff of about a dozen reporters, editors, and photographers. On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. By McKay Coppins. In truth, Freeman didnt seem particularly interested in defending Aldens reputation. 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. NPR's A Martnez talks to McKay Coppins of The Atlantic about how a hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, is buying and then gutting newspapers and the implications for democracy. Freeman would show up at business meetings straight from the gym, clad in athleisure, the executive recalled, and would find excuses to invoke his college-football heroics, saying things like When I played football at Duke, I learned some lessons about leadership. (Freeman was a walk-on placekicker on a team that won no games the year he played.). With Alden in control, he believes the Sun is now a prisoner that stands little chance of escape. Margaret Sullivan: The Constitution doesnt work without local news. In a press release Monday, Nov. 22, 2021 Alden said it sent Lee's board a letter with the offer. 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. 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. In a news release Monday, Alden said it sent Lee's board a letter with the offer. 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. A search through nonprofit groups publicly available financial reports, commonly known as Form 990s, reveals that all kinds of organizations some surprising have invested their monies with Alden over the years. 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. And when Chicago suffered a brutal summer crime wave, the paper had no one on the night shift to listen to the police scanner. 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.