The newsroom was moved to a single room rented from the local chamber of commerce. By the 1980s, this strategy has made Randy luxuriously wealthyvacations in the French Riviera, a family compound outside New York Cityand he has begun to school his children on the wonders of capitalism. 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. One known investor, however, is the Randall and Barbara Smith Foundation, named for Alden founder Smith and his wife. This story originally appeared on the Morning Edition live blog. Daily News spinoff stirs anxiety after Alden takeover - New York Post and our desire to support local newspapers over the long term." Alden said it wants to work Lee's board of . 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. Financially, it was a raw deal. Even in the greed is good climate of the era, Randy is a polarizing character on Wall Street. [10][19][20], The company has its origins in R.D. [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. Most responded with variations on the same question: Which recent stories from your newspapers have you especially appreciated? The movement gained traction in some markets, with local politicians and celebrities expressing solidarity. Hedge fund Alden in hunt for another big newspaper chain How do you know who wins? the boy asks. Alden-owned newspapers have cut their staff at twice the rate of their competitors, for all of Tribune Publishings newspapers, security company that trained Saudi operatives. Alden Global Capital has currently bid to buy all of Tribune. These were not exactly boom times for newspapers, after allat least someone wanted to buy them. But I had underestimated how little Aldens founders care about their standing in the journalism world. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital, known for making deep newsroom cuts, won approval to acquire Tribune Publishing, which includes the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and New York Daily News. Hedge fund Alden Global is buying newspaper chain Tribune Publishing We were in collective revolt, Lillian Reed, a Sun reporter who helped organize the campaign, told me. Alden Global Capital Is Killing the Newsroom - Common Dreams It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. 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. It has not, however, retained the Chicago Tribune. G ARY MARX and David Jackson, two veteran investigative reporters at the Chicago Tribune, spent most of last year seeking potential buyers who might save their newspaper from Alden Global Capital . 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. I asked. 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 . The Alden Global Capital . In budget meetings, according to the former executive, Freeman hectored local publishers, demanding that they produce detailed numbers off the top of their head and then humiliating them when they couldnt. Alden Global Capital makes an offer for Lee Enterprises, a big The term vulture capitalism hasnt been invented yet, but Randy will come to be known as a pioneer in the field. To be sure, the Knight Foundation does much to help promote and sustain local news. The pitch had a certain romantic appeal to the reporters in the room. He wrote, "Alden Global Capital has eliminated the jobs of scores of reporters and editors, and decimated journalism in cities all over the country: Denver, Boston, San Jose, Trenton, etc. Hellman and BNP together own 46.4 per cent of Allfunds' shares. The Hedge Fund Vampire That Bleeds Newspapers Dry Now Has the 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. With Alden in control, he believes the Sun is now a prisoner that stands little chance of escape. Alden completed its takeover of the Tribune papers in May. My answer is its hard to know. It's a tangled tale but essentially Asylum produced a film for the McDonald's charitable foundation for Leo. How this 'vulture' hedge fund's gutting of local newsrooms could hurt 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. Feb 16, 2021 at 8:05 pm. Live news: US manufacturing sector contracts for fourth straight month Theyre being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The newspaper lost a quarter of its staff to buyouts after it was acquired by Alden Global Capital in May. This is predatory.. 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. The paper had weathered a decade and a half of mismanagement and declining revenues and layoffs, and had finally achieved a kind of stability. 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. Some in the city started to wonder if the paper was even worth saving. [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. When he did, he exhibited a casual contempt for the journalists who worked there. 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.. In the for-profit news arena, Knight is spurring the digital transformation of local newsrooms through the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, Sherry said. To David Simon, the whimpering end of The Baltimore Sun feels both inevitable and infuriating. All good works, and Knight is to be commended for them. Coppins describes Alden as a specific type of firm: a "vulture hedge fund." [15][16] In March 2018, Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist for The Washington Post, called Alden "one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism. . 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. MediaNews Group came out of bankruptcy in March 2010 under the majority ownership of its lenders. On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Baltimore is an underdog town, Liz Bowie, a Sun reporter who was at the meeting, told me. In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. But maybe the clearest illustration is in Vallejo, California, a city of about 120,000 people 30 miles north of San Francisco. But whats happening in Chicago is different. Hedge fund Alden Global is buying newspaper chain Tribune Publishing - CNN Reading these stories now has a certain horror-movie quality: You want to somehow warn the unwitting victims of whats about to happen. [33], Alden Global Capital's management of American newspapers has been criticized. [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. Yes, today, it's a newspaper without a newsroom. With his own money, he helps his brother launch the New York Press, a free alt-weekly in Manhattan. The men killing Americas newspapers, how Slack upended the workplace, and the new meth. 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.). Feeling burned by the hedge fund, Bainum decided to make a last-minute bid for all of Tribune Publishings newspapers, pledging to line up responsible buyers in each market. They could be vain, bumbling, even corrupt. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital in hunt for Lee Enterprises newspaper The $633 million sale made Alden the nation's second largest newspaper owner in terms of circulation, with more than 200 newspapers. 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. Through it all, the owners maintained their ruthless silencespurning interview requests and declining to articulate their plans for the paper. 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. By the charitys own accounting, it lost $ 2.3 million in book value on a $17 million investment that year. Today, we know that Knight, CalPERS and others no longer invest with Alden. A century later, the Tribune Tower has retained its grandeur. Probably not.. 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. 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. 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. Glidden had heard rumblings about the papers owners when he first took the job, but he hadnt paid much attention. ", "The most feared owner in American journalism looks set to take some of its greatest assets", "Minority shareholder sues Denver Post parent and NY hedge fund over 'breaches of fiduciary duty', "What does the Chicago Tribune sale mean for the future of newsrooms? When John Glidden first joined the Vallejo Times-Herald, in 2014, it had a staff of about a dozen reporters, editors, and photographers. It has filed a lawsuit in its bid to buy out news publisher Lee Enterprises. There were sober op-eds and lamentations on Twitter and expressions of disappointment by professors of journalism. '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. It's traded in a prestigious downtown newsroom for a "Chipotle-sized office" near the printing press. Its a hedge that went and bought up some titles that it milks for cash.. Connecting this to the current state of American newspaper ownership seems rather tenuous.. Opinions - Help yourself. Is it ever okay to nick an idea? [2][3] By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers. 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. I felt like a terrible reporter because I couldnt get to everything.. Nov. 22, 2021. They had a father-figure relationship, one told me. 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. 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. 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. Theres no industry that I can think of more integral to a working democracy than the local-news business, he said. Heath hopes the well never runs dry, but hes going to keep pumping until it does. Alden Global Capital is a hedge fund based in Manhattan, New York City. Freeman was only slightly more accessible. Tips that he would never have time to investigate piled up on a legal pad he kept at his desk. Module 5- Journalism.pdf - Journalism Modules - The 5 Ws By 2011, when Aldens Distressed Opportunities Fund lost more than 20 percent of its value, Knights holdings in the fund were valued at $10.7 million. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith. 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. 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 aims to buy Lee Enterprises | The Gazette 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. [32], The company has been criticized for investing money for pensions of newspaper employees in funds it manages itself. Year after year, the executives from Alden would order new budget cuts, and Glidden would end up with fewer co-workers and more work. The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of . When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. [3] [4] With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late . In 2016 (year of the most recent 990 available), the foundation invested $17 million in Alden funds. The Tribune Tower, the iconic former home of the Chicago Tribune, seen in Chicago, Illinois in 2015. He stops talking to the press, refuses to be photographed, and rarely appears in public. Live news updates from February 28: Tesla to build Mexico - ft.com New York hedge fund and U.S. newspaper consolidator Alden Global Capital LLC has made a proposal to take Lee Enterprises Inc. private in a deal that values the company at around $141 million. For two men who employ thousands of journalists, remarkably little is known about them. Already the largest shareholder . Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you . Alden Launches $142 Million Bid for Publisher Lee Enterprises And that has consequences for democracy, as journalist McKay Coppins writes in The Atlantic. Otherwise, youre just peeing in the ocean.. Freeman, his 41-year-old protg and the president of the firm, would be unrecognizable in most of the newsrooms he owns. The 5 global Trends in Journalism: 1 We've moved from a world where media organizations were gatekeepers to a world where media still creates the news agenda, but platform companies control access to audiences 2 this move to digital media generally does not generate filter bubbles Instead automated Serendipity + incidental exposure drive people . [4] [5] The company added more newspapers to its portfolio in May 2021 when it purchased Tribune . 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. Meanwhile, the Tribunes remaining staff, which had been spread thin even before Alden came along, struggled to perform the newspapers most basic functions. 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 . 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. Freeman never responded. Its the meanness and the elegance of the capitalist marketplace brought to newspapers, Doctor told me. Updated May 21, 2021 at 2:13 PM ET. The editor in chief mysteriously resigned, and managers scrambled to deal with the cuts. Meet the Hedge Fund Boss Who Just Bought Tribune's Newspapers Alden gradually took control of the papers that would become DFM. But a sense of fatalism permeated the work. 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 . It was like watching a slow-motion disaster, says Gregory Pratt, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. The hollowing-out of the Chicago Tribune was noted in the national press, of course. For Freeman, newspapers are financial assets and nothing morenumbers to be rearranged on spreadsheets until they produce the maximum returns for investors. But that would require slow, painstaking workand there are easier ways to make money. It . He used his own money to pull court records, and went years without going on a vacation. [4][13], In November 2021, Alden made an offer to Lee to purchase the company in its entirety for roughly $141 million. After a powerful Illinois state legislator resigned amid bribery allegations, the paper didnt have a reporter in Springfield to follow the resulting scandal. 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. Aldens calculus was simple. The pay was terrible and the work was not glamorous, but Glidden loved his job. 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. But we dont know, because they arent saying. 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 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. 'Vulture' Fund Alden Global, Known For Slashing Newsrooms, Buys Tribune What Alden's potential acquisition of Lee Enterprises means for 20-plus When a reporter asked if their work was still valued, the editor sounded deflated. Morale tanked; reporters burned out. Heath Freeman in an undated photo provided by Goldin Solutions . Coordinated by . [2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman. Since Alden's . But in the case of local news, nothing comparable is ready to replace these papers when they die. Chicago-based Tribune Publishing on Tuesday announced a proposed sale to hedge fund Alden Global Capital in a deal valued at $630 million. . Alden, which owns more than 200 newspapers across the country, has developed a reputation for using extensive layoffs and severe cost cuts at the newspapers it owns. A recent Financial Times analysis found that half of all daily newspapers in the U.S. are controlled by financial firms, and Coppins says that number is all but certain to keep growing. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital is attempting to acquire Davenport-based Lee Enterprises, one of the country's largest newspaper chains, in all the markings of a hostile takeover. Iowa-based Lee Enterprises asks investors to help fight off hedge fund Alden Global Capital. We were like, Theyre not going to take our newspaper from us! 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. But even for a group of journalists, it was tough to keep the publics attention. 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. 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. Hes acutely aware of the risksI may end up with egg on my face, he saidbut he believes its worth trying to develop a successful model that could be replicated in other markets. In my many conversations with people who have worked with Freeman, not one could recall seeing him read a newspaper. 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. Heath Freeman, president of Alden Global Capital, is known for pushing big cost reductions, which he says help to save newspapers. By that point, Alden was widely known as the grim reaper of American newspapers, as Vanity Fair had put it, and news of the acquisition plans had unleashed a wave of panic across the industry. Pioneer Press owner buys 11 more Minnesota papers - Star Tribune Read: What we lost when Gannett came to town. What happens next? When Alden first started buying newspapers, at the tail end of the Great Recession, the industry responded with cautious optimism. 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 . In May 2021, Tribune Publishing finalized its sale to Alden, after having announced in February 2021 that it intended to pursue this path. Hedge fund reaches $630m deal to buy remaining Tribune Publishing Coppins offers several examples, like the Chicago Tribune and California's Vallejo Times-Herald. He had spoken on this issue before, and it was easy to see why. John Temple: My newspaper died 10 years ago. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. California biotech billionaire and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns 24%, Other large shareholders include Californian asset manager Capital Group and UK fund manager Jupiter Asset Management. In February 2021, he announced a handshake deal to buy the Sun from Alden for $65 million once it acquired Tribune Publishing. Next up: Chicago, Baltimore, and the New York Daily 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 feels like were going up against capitalism now, Lillian Reed, the reporter who helped launch the Save Our Sun campaign, told me. 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. Tuesday, 23 November 2021 07:46 PM EST. Im repulsed by the incestuous world of New York journalism, he tells New York magazine. But within weeks, Bainum said, Alden tried to tack on a five-year licensing deal that would have cost him tens of millions more. Aldens website contains no information beyond the firms name, and its list of investors is kept strictly confidential. On March 9, 2020, a small group of Baltimore Sun reporters convened a secret meeting at the downtown Hyatt Regency. People who know him described Freemanwith his shellacked curls, perma-stubble, and omnipresent smirkas the archetypal Wall Street frat boy. Hedge Fund Alden in Hunt for Another Big Newspaper Chain [13], Newspapers in Alden's portfolio include Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Boston Herald, The Mercury News, East Bay Times, The Orange County Register, and Orlando Sentinel. After all, it has a long and venerable history of supporting local news. Or to nearby Monterey, where the former Herald reporter Julie Reynolds says staffers were pushed to stop writing investigative features so they could produce multiple stories a day. . 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. Its a game, Randy explains to his son. It's newspaper-endorsement season again, and that means it's Should newspapers do endorsements?season again. Lee, which owns the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Omaha World-Herald and many other daily newspapers throughout the region, is staving off a takeover attempt by Alden Global Capital, a New-York .