what newspapers does alden global capital own

He can cite decades-old scoops and tell you whom they pissed off. 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. Below are highlights from his conversation with Morning Edition's A Martnez. Who Profits From Alden Global Capital? [27] The Alden lawsuit asserts that the members of the Lee board "have every reason to maintain the status quo and their lucrative corporate positions" and that they are "focused more on [their] own power than what's best for the company. Instead, they gutted the place. 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. So Freeman pivoted. Joe Pompeo pilloried Alden in Vanity Fair for reducing newsrooms. "[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. And when Chicago suffered a brutal summer crime wave, the paper had no one on the night shift to listen to the police scanner. Am I going to win against capitalism in America? 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 . Hellman and BNP together own 46.4 per cent of Allfunds' shares. 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. He stops talking to the press, refuses to be photographed, and rarely appears in public. Freeman, his 41-year-old protg and the president of the firm, would be unrecognizable in most of the newsrooms he owns. Alden, which already owned one-third of . In a press release Monday, Nov. 22, 2021 Alden said it sent Lee's board a letter with the offer. 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. While some finance reporters noted that Smiths newspaper investments were all losing value, none seemed to notice that Smith and Aldens president Heath Freeman would soon start strip mining their news companies real estate and other assets. 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. Well, he told me, they have some very good reporters., This article appears in the November 2021 print edition with the headline The Men Who Are Killing Americas Newspapers., A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms, I Dont Know That I Would Even Call It Meth Anymore, W. G. Sebald Ransacked Jewish Lives for His Fictions. 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. A look at Alden Global Capital is the cover story of the latest . So who is investing with them? but sadly on a global scale there is hardly any independent news sources left currently. 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 . It was all about the next quarters profit margins, says Matt DeRienzo, who worked as a publisher for Aldens Connecticut newspapers before finally resigning. The movement gained traction in some markets, with local politicians and celebrities expressing solidarity. Smith & Company. 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 . To David Simon, the whimpering end of The Baltimore Sun feels both inevitable and infuriating. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith. It's newspaper-endorsement season again, and that means it's Should newspapers do endorsements?season again. MediaNews Group came out of bankruptcy in March 2010 under the majority ownership of its lenders. Over the course of seven years, Alden doubled profits in its Bay Area News Group newspapers, another home to cutbacks. 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. Lee Enterprises, the owner of daily newspapers in Winston-Salem and Greensboro, this morning rejected a hedge fund's proposal to take over the company. And everyone knows its going to run dry.. The question was how. He took particular pride in finding novel ways to give away his family fortune, funding child-poverty initiatives in Baltimore and prenatal care for women in Liberia. Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. 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. 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. [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. But he has a big idea: He believes theres serious money to be made in buying troubled companies, steering them into bankruptcy, and then selling them off in parts. 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? Most responded with variations on the same question: Which recent stories from your newspapers have you especially appreciated? 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. We were in collective revolt, Lillian Reed, a Sun reporter who helped organize the campaign, told me. Alden Global Capital revealed a proposal Monday to purchase Lee Enterprise Inc. and its newspapers at $24 a share, casting alarm through the many newsrooms owned by Lee. I sort of bully people around to get stuff done, he boasted to The Washington Post in 1985. He had spoken on this issue before, and it was easy to see why. [29] This attempt also failed, as shareholders returned both directors to the Lee board despite Alden's opposition. 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. 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. 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 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. At the time, the Sun had a bustling bureau in Annapolis, and he marveled at the reporters ability to sort the honest politicians from the political whores by exposing abuses of power. From the March 1914 issue: H. L. Mencken on newspaper morals, A story circulated throughout the companypossibly apocryphal, though no one could say for surethat when Freeman was informed that The Denver Post had won a Pulitzer in 2013, his first response was: Does that come with any money?. 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. . About a month after The Baltimore Sun was acquired by Alden, a senior editor at the paper took questions from anxious reporters on Zoom. [10][19][20], The company has its origins in R.D. 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 . . Other records turned up from public pension funds and filings of publicly traded companies. [14], Alden has a reputation for sharply cutting costs by reducing the number of journalists working on its newspapers. The Banner will launch with about 50 journalistsnot far from the size of the Sunand an ambitious mandate. Bainum told me hed come to appreciate local journalism in the 1970s while serving in the Maryland state legislature. What exactly went wrong would become a point of bitter debate among the journalists involved in the campaigns. In a news release Monday, Alden said it sent Lee's board a letter with the offer. Alden Global Capital already had a 32% stake in Tribune Publishing, which owns famous names like the Tribune, Daily News, the Hartford Courant and others, and on Tuesday announced it would pay . By the charitys own accounting, it lost $ 2.3 million in book value on a $17 million investment that year. 'Vulture' Fund Alden Global, Known For Slashing Newsrooms, Buys Tribune Papers, Stop The Presses! [6][7][8][9], The company operates its media holdings through Digital First Media (DFM), which it acquired in 2010 after DMG's parent company, MediaNews Group, declared bankruptcy. The newspaper lost a quarter of its staff to buyouts after it was acquired by Alden Global Capital in May. But this acquisition was profound, making Alden Global . A former Sun reporter whose work on the police beat famously led to his creation of The Wire on HBO, Simon told me the paper had suffered for years under a series of blundering corporate ownersand it was only a matter of time before an enterprise as cold-blooded as Alden finally put it out of its misery. ", "Denver Post Rebels Against Its Hedge-Fund Ownership", "Tribune Says Sale to Alden Wins Approval Amid Confusion Over Key Shareholder's Vote", "Lee Enterprises Shares Jump on Takeover Offer From Alden", "The vulture is hungry again: Alden Global Capital wants to buy a few hundred more newspapers", "Colorado Group Pushes to Buy Embattled Denver Post From New York Hedge Fund", "The battle for Tribune: Inside the campaign to find new owners for a legendary group of newspapers", "Is this strip-mining or journalism? 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 . 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. 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. 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. 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. I put the question to Freeman, but he declined to answer on the record. In 2016 (year of the most recent 990 available), the foundation invested $17 million in Alden funds. Much of the Knight family's once-grand newspaper empire was ultimately acquired by Alden Global Capital, while the family foundation invested in Alden funds. On more than one occasion, according to people I spoke with, he asked aloud, What do all these people do? According to the former executive, Freeman once suggested in a meeting that Aldens newspapers could get rid of all their full-time reporters and rely entirely on freelancers. 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. I would know he didnt mean it, and he would know he didnt mean it, but he would at least go through the motions. AP. 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. The newspaper lost a quarter of its staff to buyouts after it was acquired by Alden Global Capital in May. ", "Hedge Fund Reaches a Deal to Buy Tribune Publishing", "Opinion - Will The Chicago Tribune Be the Next Newspaper Picked to the Bone? He used his own money to pull court records, and went years without going on a vacation. . 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. On . When the city-hall reporter left a few months later, he picked up that beat too. There were sober op-eds and lamentations on Twitter and expressions of disappointment by professors of journalism. Heath Freeman, president of Alden Global Capital, is known for pushing big cost reductions, which he says help to save newspapers. Lee's board of directors . So far, Alden has limited its closures primarily to weekly newspapers, but Doctor argues its only a matter of time before the firm starts shutting down its dailies as well. 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 . hide caption. (Freeman denied this through a spokesperson.) [2][3] By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers. She was writing about Aldens growing newspaper empire, and wanted to know what it was like to be the last news reporter in town. The Tribune Tower, the iconic former home of the Chicago Tribune, seen in Chicago, Illinois in 2015. Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund that this year became the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States, has made an offer to purchase Lee Enterprises, the media company that owns 75 daily newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 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 . His editor cited a supposed journalistic infraction (Glidden had reported the resignation of a school superintendent before an agreed-upon embargo). 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 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. 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. This is a subscription-based business.. Even in the greed is good climate of the era, Randy is a polarizing character on Wall Street. Tips that he would never have time to investigate piled up on a legal pad he kept at his desk. A vulture doesnt hold a wounded animals head underwater. Earnest and unpolished, with a perpetually mussed mop of hair, Bainum presented himself as a contrast to the cutthroat capitalists at Alden. 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 . Even as Aldens portfolio grew, Freeman rarely visited his newspapers. But for that to happen, the Big Tech money would need to flow to underfunded newsrooms, not into the pockets of Aldens investors. [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. The show draws from a book written by a Sun reporter, and Simon was quick to point out that the paper still has good journalists covering important stories. It has not, however, retained the Chicago Tribune. These include the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and The Baltimore Sun. 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 . When Simon called me, he was on the set of his new miniseries, We Own This City, which tells the true story of Baltimore cops who spent years running their own drug ring from inside the police department. Now he was feeling the effects of their management. On the appointed afternoon, I dialed the number provided by his spokesperson and found myself talking to the most feared man in American newspapers. Traditional newspaper business model says you make 95% of your money off ad sales and the rest off subscriptions. He started as a general-assignment reporter, covering local crime and community events. Smith & Company, a firm founded by Randall Duncan Smith, initially using the $20,000 cash prize he and his wife won on the 1968-1970 gameshow Dream House. At the Pioneer Press , where its staff is down to 60, the paper produced a . But while its true that Alden entered the industry by purchasing floundering newspapers, not all of them were necessarily doomed to liquidation. 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. Knight first reported its investment in Alden in 2010, noting the fair market value of its Alden holdings was $13.4 million. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you . Shortly after the Tribune deal closed earlier this year, I began trying to interview the men behind Alden Capital. A young man named Randall Duncan SmithRandy for shortstands next to his wife, Kathryn, answering quick-fire trivia questions in front of a live studio audience. Here was one of Americas most storied newspapersa publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizesreduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle. By McKay Coppins. Meanwhile, reporters fanned out across their respective cities in search of benevolent rich people to buy their newspapers. Alden's holdings already spanned the country, including the . 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. [8][24] Tribune Publishing publishes nine major metropolitan dailies. It financed the deal with the help of Cerberusa private-equity firm that owned, among other businesses, the security company that trained Saudi operatives who participated in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But he says the worst culprit is the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which bought the Mercury in 2011 and has since sold the paper's building and slashed newsroom staff by about 70%. by Magnus Shaw..An enormous advertising company (Leo Burnett) and a small creative film company (Asylum) have had a difficult couple of weeks. When the journalists created a Slack channel to coordinate their efforts across multiple newspapers, they dubbed it Project Mayhem.. 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. It hurts to see the paper like this, he told her. Shareholders of Tribune Publishing, one of the country's largest newspaper chains, on Friday approved a takeover by hedge fund Alden Global Capital. 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. Next year, Bainum will launch The Baltimore Banner, an all-digital, nonprofit news outlet. He writes a weekly column called Mugger that savages the citys journalists by name and frequently runs to 10,000 words. But outside the industry, few seemed to notice. 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. The newsroom was moved to a single room rented from the local chamber of commerce. We dont hear from them Theyre, like, nameless, faceless people., In the months that followed, the Sun did not immediately experience the same deep staff cuts that other papers did. More to the point, Tribune Publishingwhich represents a substantial portion of Aldens titleswas profitable at the time of the acquisition. Newspapers Affect Us, Often In Ways We Don't Realize, 'Project Mayhem': Reporters Race To Save Tribune Papers From 'Vulture' Fund. Reading these stories now has a certain horror-movie quality: You want to somehow warn the unwitting victims of whats about to happen. The Alden Global Capital . The story of Alden Capital begins on the set of a 1960s TV game show called Dream House. All good works, and Knight is to be commended for them. After weeks of back-and-forth, he agreed to a phone call, but only if parts of the conversation could be on background (which is to say, I could use the information generally but not attribute it to him). Tuesday, 23 November 2021 07:46 PM EST. "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. When John Glidden first joined the Vallejo Times-Herald, in 2014, it had a staff of about a dozen reporters, editors, and photographers. 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. But by 2013, despite deep losses to Alden funds overall values in the previous two years, Smith was able to begin buying his now infamous swath of South Florida mansions for $58 million and Freeman was acquiring multi-million-dollar New York condos. [33], Alden Global Capital's management of American newspapers has been criticized. Feb. 16, 2021 8:04 PM PT. Glidden, then a mild-mannered 30-year-old, had come to journalism later in life than most and was eager to prove himself. It's traded in a prestigious downtown newsroom for a "Chipotle-sized office" near the printing press. At their worst, they used their papers to maintain oppressive social hierarchies. 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. Three days later, Bainumstill smarting from his experience with Alden, but worried about the Suns fatesent a pride-swallowing email to Freeman. The Tribune had been profitable when Alden took over. Interestingly, Smiths foundation didnt do well with its Alden investments in 2016. Some people believe that local newspapers will eventually be replaced by new publications, which Coppins describes as "built from the ground-up for the digital era." That's because the fund is stepping in to buy and then gut newsrooms across the country. I asked if anyone there at the time was aware of Aldens vulture business strategy. 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. The Tribune Tower, the iconic former home of the Chicago Tribune, seen in Chicago, Illinois in 2015. So why be surprised that Knight-Ridder or anyone else is investing in destructive but profitable ventures? These papers would have been liquidated if not for us stepping up.. 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. Tribune Publishing, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers, has agreed to be acquired by Alden Global Capital in a deal valued at $630 million . But within weeks, Bainum said, Alden tried to tack on a five-year licensing deal that would have cost him tens of millions more.

Private Landlord Houses For Rent Derby, Ks, Italy Men's Soccer Roster, Jenni Rivera First House She Bought, James Spader House Greenwich Village, Wreck On 157 Cullman, Al Today, Articles W