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

"[26] Shortly thereafter, Alden Global, through its operating unit Strategic Investment Opportunities, filed a lawsuit in state court in Delaware against Lee Enterprises. Alden Global Capital swallowed all of the Tribune's newspapers, including the New York Daily News, earlier in 2021. Instead, they gutted the place. about two hundred American newspapers. On Monday, Dail Smith began investing in newspapers and media around the same time. 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. NPR reached out to Alden for a response. A spokesman took issue with the entirety of the story, and laid out a long list of questions attacking the integrity of the reporter, The Atlantic and some of his sources without addressing some of the more specific claims within the report. Freeman never responded. 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 . Im repulsed by the incestuous world of New York journalism, he tells New York magazine. These were not exactly boom times for newspapers, after allat least someone wanted to buy them. Located in the same Manhattan office building as Alden, it funds stem-cell research, health-related charities, arts and culture and Duke University, alma mater of Smiths protg Heath Freeman. Alden currently owns 32%. 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. Dec 9, 2021. 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. 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. After serving in the Carter administrations Treasury Department, Brian became widely knownand fearedin the 80s for his hard-line negotiating style. 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. 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. At one point, I tracked down the photographer whod taken the only existing picture of Smith on the internet. 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. The Alden Global Capital . A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms. At their worst, they used their papers to maintain oppressive social hierarchies. Yes, today, it's a newspaper without a newsroom. Feb. 16, 2021 8:04 PM PT. In May 2021, Tribune Publishing finalized its sale to Alden, after having announced in February 2021 that it intended to pursue this path. 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. 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. 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. Knight first reported its investment in Alden in 2010, noting the fair market value of its Alden holdings was $13.4 million. Aldens Distressed Opportunities Fund was launched in 2008 and saw astounding success in its first few months, showing returns of more than 30 percent a big rescue for Alden, whose investments in Russia the year before had lost more than 61 percent of their value. The audio for this interview was produced by Ryan Benk and edited by Scott Saloway. The pay was terrible and the work was not glamorous, but Glidden loved his job. To many, it just didnt seem possible that Alden would instead choose to destroy newspapers by laying off the workforce en masse and stripping papers of all their assets. 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. Former Knight-Ridder headquarters. [14], Alden has a reputation for sharply cutting costs by reducing the number of journalists working on its newspapers. 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. The men killing Americas newspapers, how Slack upended the workplace, and the new meth. Freeman, meanwhile, would later gloat to colleagues that Bainum was never serious about buying the newspapers and just wanted to bask in the worshipful media coverage his bid generated. [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. My answer is its hard to know. 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. 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?. Misinformation proliferates. The details of how Smith got to know him are opaque, but the resulting loyalty was evident. 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. 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. 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. 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. Its hard to imagine theyd show, anyway. [2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman. and our desire to support local newspapers over the long term." Alden said it wants to work Lee's board of . Media . So why be surprised that Knight-Ridder or anyone else is investing in destructive but profitable ventures? It turned out that those ownersNew York hedge funders whom Glidden took to calling the lizard peoplewere laser-focused on increasing the papers profit margins. 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. The newsroom was moved to a single room rented from the local chamber of commerce. Reinventing their papers could require years of false starts and fine-tuningand, most important, a delayed payday for Aldens investors. Alden is known for . Another ex-publisher told me Freeman believed that local newspapers should be treated like any other commodity in an extractive business. Its not as if the Tribune is just withering on the vine despite the best efforts of the gardeners, Charlie Johnson, a former Metro reporter, told me after the latest round of buyouts this summer. It emphasizes supporting the emergence of new, sustainable models for local news, through both grantmaking and research, Sherry told me, including grant programs for nonprofit news organizations. The story of Alden Capital begins on the set of a 1960s TV game show called Dream House. After a powerful Illinois state legislator resigned amid bribery allegations, the paper didnt have a reporter in Springfield to follow the resulting scandal. 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. '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. He shut down Project Thunderdome, parted ways with Paton, and placed all of Aldens newspapers on the auction block. 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. Reading these stories now has a certain horror-movie quality: You want to somehow warn the unwitting victims of whats about to happen. 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. He had spoken on this issue before, and it was easy to see why. . [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. 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. [8][24] Tribune Publishing publishes nine major metropolitan dailies. 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. Through it all, the owners maintained their ruthless silencespurning interview requests and declining to articulate their plans for the paper. So Freeman pivoted. Smith. Most of his investments are defined by a cold pragmatism, but he takes a more personal interest in the media sector. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone. Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. 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. Meanwhile, with few newsroom jobs left to eliminate, Alden continued to find creative ways to cut costs. ", "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 the sale failed to attract a sufficiently high offer, Freeman turned his attention to squeezing as much cash out of the newspapers as possible. 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. Most responded with variations on the same question: Which recent stories from your newspapers have you especially appreciated? That may well be the future of local news, he says. But in the meantime, there isn't really anything that can fill the hole these newspapers will leave if they're shut down. The largest share of the blame was assigned to the Tribune board for allowing the sale to Alden to go through. He quotes H. L. Mencken, the papers crusading 20th-century columnist, on the joys of journalism: It is really the life of kings. Some have even suggested that this represents Americas last chance to save its local-news industry. What exactly went wrong would become a point of bitter debate among the journalists involved in the campaigns. In legal filings, Alden has acknowledged diverting hundreds of millions of dollars from its newspapers into risky bets on commercial real estate, a bankrupt pharmacy chain, and Greek debt bonds. When the Chicago Tribune held a Save Local News rally, most of the people who showed up were members of the media. Well, that wasnt the point. The question was how. What most concerns him is how his city will manage without a robust paper keeping tabs on the people in charge. 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. Am I going to win against capitalism in America? 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. [2][3] By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers. 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.. 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. No response came back. 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 . Alden gradually took control of the papers that would become DFM. Vallejo deserves better. A few weeks after the story came out, he was fired. 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. 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. Margaret Sullivan: The Constitution doesnt work without local news. But in the case of local news, nothing comparable is ready to replace these papers when they die. The firm oversaw the promotion of John Paton, a charismatic digital-media evangelist, who improved the papers web and mobile offerings and increased online ad revenue. 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. 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 . 'Vulture' Fund Alden Global, Known For Slashing Newsrooms, Buys Tribune Papers, Stop The Presses! Heath Freeman in an undated photo provided by Goldin Solutions . Aldens calculus was simple. It feels like were going up against capitalism now, Lillian Reed, the reporter who helped launch the Save Our Sun campaign, told me. The $633 million sale made Alden the nation's second largest newspaper owner in terms of circulation, with more than 200 newspapers. Frustrated and worn out, Glidden broke down one day last spring when a reporter from The Washington Post called. 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. It makes me profoundly sad to think about what the Trib was, what it is, and what its likely to become, says David Axelrod, who was a reporter at the paper before becoming an adviser to Barack Obama. His editor cited a supposed journalistic infraction (Glidden had reported the resignation of a school superintendent before an agreed-upon embargo). Longtime Tribune staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister. He writes a weekly column called Mugger that savages the citys journalists by name and frequently runs to 10,000 words. On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. "[21], shareholder rights plan, colloquially known as a "poison pill", "Alden Global Capital LLC NEW YORK , NY", "Company Overview of Alden Global Capital LLC", "Heath Freeman of Alden Global Capital says he wants to save local news. At the time, finalternatives.com reported that the Global Distress Opportunities fund would focus on financial firms as well as homebuilding, gaming and auto-related names.. It has figured out how to make a profit by driving newspapers into the ground, he says, since Alden's aim is not to make them into long-term sustainable businesses but rather maximize profits quickly to show it has made a winning investment. 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. Hes impressed by their journalism, he told me, but his clearest takeaway is that theyre not nearly well funded enough. 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). One known investor, however, is the Randall and Barbara Smith Foundation, named for Alden founder Smith and his wife. Knight began selling off its Alden holdings in 2012, and got completely out in 2014. The one central theme, the Times reports, seems to be that Smith and its web of affiliates are out, first and foremost, for themselves. If this reputation bothers Randy and his colleagues, they dont let on: For a while, according to The Village Voice, his firm proudly hangs a painting of a vulture in its lobby. He studied art at Alfred University under sculptors Glenn Zweygardt and William Parry. In 2016 (year of the most recent 990 available), the foundation invested $17 million in Alden funds. But for Simon, that paper exists entirely in the past. If they did it right, Venetoulis said, they just might be able to line up a local, civic-minded owner for the paper. Iowa-based Lee Enterprises asks investors to help fight off hedge fund Alden Global Capital. [4][13], In November 2021, Alden made an offer to Lee to purchase the company in its entirety for roughly $141 million. It wasn't the first newspaper acquisition for this hedge fund firm, nor is it the only firm of its kind eyeing the nation's newspapers. 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 . * Edited from 'independent . 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. 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. But a sense of fatalism permeated the work. Plus how Facebook is a hostile foreign power, the engineers daughter, the collapse of music genres, Dostoyevsky, W. G. Sebald, nasty return logistics, and more. "[17] and Vanity Fair dubbed Alden the "grim reaper of American newspapers. The best architects of the era were invited to submit designs; lofty quotes about the Fourth Estate were selected to adorn the lobby. Traditional newspaper business model says you make 95% of your money off ad sales and the rest off subscriptions. But by 2014, it was becoming clear to Aldens executives that Patons approach would be difficult to monetize in the short term, according to people familiar with the firms thinking. Alden Global Capital has currently bid to buy all of Tribune. October 14, 2021. Glidden had heard rumblings about the papers owners when he first took the job, but he hadnt paid much attention.