what newspapers does alden global capital own

. 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 . [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. One, the warning shot was fired in 2011, in a Poynter Institute article titled Who is investor Randall Smith and why is he buying up newspaper companies? Randall Smith is the co-founder of Alden, together with his young protg, Heath Freeman, and has been called the grandfather of vulture investing. Vulture funds by definition dont reinvest in their properties they suck them dry. Its a game, Randy explains to his son. To David Simon, the whimpering end of The Baltimore Sun feels both inevitable and infuriating. Instead, they gutted the place. 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. Margaret Sullivan: The Constitution doesnt work without local news. Instead, they gutted the place. 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. 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. In the for-profit news arena, Knight is spurring the digital transformation of local newsrooms through the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, Sherry said. The best architects of the era were invited to submit designs; lofty quotes about the Fourth Estate were selected to adorn the lobby. We were like, Theyre not going to take our newspaper from us! The men who devised this model are Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital. 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. What happens next? But while its true that Alden entered the industry by purchasing floundering newspapers, not all of them were necessarily doomed to liquidation. "60 Minutes" correspondent Jon Wertheim did a strong piece that aired Sunday night about the grim state of local newspapers, in part because of how hedge funds, such as Alden Global Capital . It's traded in a prestigious downtown newsroom for a "Chipotle-sized office" near the printing press. What most concerns him is how his city will manage without a robust paper keeping tabs on the people in charge. Alden, a New York City-based firm that has become the grim reaper of American newspapers, had recently increased its stake in Tribune Publishing to 32%making it the largest shareholder of the . Glidden, then a mild-mannered 30-year-old, had come to journalism later in life than most and was eager to prove himself. Reinventing their papers could require years of false starts and fine-tuningand, most important, a delayed payday for Aldens investors. Otherwise, youre just peeing in the ocean.. 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. It . Some have even suggested that this represents Americas last chance to save its local-news industry. Freeman was more animated when he turned to the prospect of extracting money from Big Tech. To him, its the same as oil, the publisher said. Even as Aldens portfolio grew, Freeman rarely visited his newspapers. Maybe theyd cancel their subscriptions eventually; maybe the papers would fold altogether. It is a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital, the New York City hedge fund that backed the purchase of and dramatic cost-cutting at more than 100 newspapers causing more than 1,000 lost jobs. Vallejo deserves better. A few weeks after the story came out, he was fired. 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. Below are highlights from his conversation with Morning Edition's A Martnez. "Local newspaper brands and operations are the engines that power trusted local news in communities across the United States," Heath Freeman, president of Alden Global Capital, said in a . [14], Alden has a reputation for sharply cutting costs by reducing the number of journalists working on its newspapers. 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? A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms. And everyone knows its going to run dry.. AP. Of course, its easy to romanticize past eras of journalism. This all seemed especially relevant considering many Alden/DFM papers were previously part of the Knight-Ridder chain, the family news empire from which the foundation sprang. Around this time, Randy becomes preoccupied with privacy. The audio for this interview was produced by Ryan Benk and edited by Scott Saloway. Those that have survived are smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable to acquisition. 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. But maybe the clearest illustration is in Vallejo, California, a city of about 120,000 people 30 miles north of San Francisco. Theres little evidence that Alden cares about the sustainability of its newspapers. They could be vain, bumbling, even corrupt. Researchers at the University of North Carolina found that Alden-owned newspapers have cut their staff at twice the rate of their competitors; not coincidentally, circulation has fallen faster too, according to Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst who reviewed data from some of the papers. When Alden first started buying newspapers, at the tail end of the Great Recession, the industry responded with cautious optimism. 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. Neither man will ever be the guest of honor at the annual dinner for the Committee to Protect Journalistsand thats probably fine by them. The newsroom was moved to a single room rented from the local chamber of commerce. The final product, completed in 1925, was an architectural spectacle unlike anything the city had seen beforeromance in stone and steel, as one writer described it. The Ubiquity - The student news site of Quartz Hill High School Instead, the money was used to finance the hedge funds other ventures. For Smith, the Palm Beach conservative and Trump ally, sticking it to the mainstream media might actually be a perk of Aldens strategy. It feels like were going up against capitalism now, Lillian Reed, the reporter who helped launch the Save Our Sun campaign, told me. He gained 100 pounds and started grinding his teeth at night. 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. [31], In 2019, Twenty Lake Holdings reported that it had acquired about 180 properties with 2.3 million square feet of real estate in 29 states. My question was did Knight know what Alden was doing to newspapers when it invested with the hedge fund, and does it regret that investment now? Layout design was outsourced to freelancers in the Philippines. Over the course of seven years, Alden doubled profits in its Bay Area News Group newspapers, another home to cutbacks. But the group that jumps out to me on the list is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Unless the Tribunes trajectory changes, Chicago may soon provide a grim case study. MediaNews Group came out of bankruptcy in March 2010 under the majority ownership of its lenders. 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. Alden currently owns 32%. 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. 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. You need real capital to move the needle, he told me. 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. At the Pioneer Press , where its staff is down to 60, the paper produced a . Meanwhile, with few newsroom jobs left to eliminate, Alden continued to find creative ways to cut costs. 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. Heath Freeman, president of Alden Global Capital, is known for pushing big cost reductions, which he says help to save newspapers. I sort of bully people around to get stuff done, he boasted to The Washington Post in 1985. Coordinated by . After all, it has a long and venerable history of supporting local news. 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 . Alden, which already owned one-third of . That gave the journalists at the Sun a brief window to stop the sale from going through. 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. Freeman was only slightly more accessible. The Tampa Bay Times has sold its printing plant at 1301 34th St. N to a real estate arm of Alden Global Capital, a New York hedge fund that is the second-largest newspaper owner in the country. That's because the fund is stepping in to buy and then gut newsrooms across the country. Shares of Lee Enterprises Inc. rose sharply Monday after hedge fund Alden Global Capital LLC offered to buy the newspaper publisher for about $141 million. 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. 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. Before our interview, Id contacted a number of Aldens reporters to find out what they would ask their boss if they ever had the chance. But that's not true for all of them. Alden gradually took control of the papers that would become DFM. [2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman. Im repulsed by the incestuous world of New York journalism, he tells New York magazine. Bainum envisioned rebuilding the paperwhich, by 2020, was down to a single full-time statehouse reporteras a nonprofit. [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. "The question is, will local communities decide that this is an important issue, that it's worth saving these newspapers, protecting them from firms like Alden, or will they decide that they don't really care?" Joe Pompeo pilloried Alden in Vanity Fair for reducing newsrooms. Bainum told me hed come to appreciate local journalism in the 1970s while serving in the Maryland state legislature. [29] This attempt also failed, as shareholders returned both directors to the Lee board despite Alden's opposition. For a fleeting moment, Aldens newspapers became unexpected darlings of the journalism industrywritten about by Poynter and Nieman Lab, endorsed by academics like Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis. To be sure, the Knight Foundation does much to help promote and sustain local news. Ken Kelleher is an American sculptor. Chicago-based Tribune Publishing on Tuesday announced a proposed sale to hedge fund Alden Global Capital in a deal valued at $630 million. Next up: Chicago, Baltimore, and the New York Daily News. 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.

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