Chicago-based Tribune Publishing on Tuesday announced a proposed sale to hedge fund Alden Global Capital in a deal valued at $630 million. But even for a group of journalists, it was tough to keep the publics attention. 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. 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. Today, we know that Knight, CalPERS and others no longer invest with Alden. It hurts to see the paper like this, he told her. Meanwhile, reporters fanned out across their respective cities in search of benevolent rich people to buy their newspapers. [10][19][20], The company has its origins in R.D. It feels like were going up against capitalism now, Lillian Reed, the reporter who helped launch the Save Our Sun campaign, told me. You could look to Oakland, California, where the East Bay Times laid off 20 people one week after the paper won a Pulitzer. 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. Baltimore has always had its problems, he told me. 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. Theres no industry that I can think of more integral to a working democracy than the local-news business, he said. Like many alumni of the Sun, Simon is steeped in the papers history. And two, by at least 2013, those of us who worked at Alden-controlled papers (like me) were already experiencing the slashing and burning. My answer is its hard to know. Alden Global Capital has currently bid to buy all of Tribune. Dec 9, 2021. But Glidden felt sure he knew the real reason: Alden wanted him gone. 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. They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think thats honestly a misnomer, Johnson said. 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. he asks. Gerry Smith. One early article, in the trade publication Poynter, suggested that Aldens interest in the local-news business could be seen as flattering and quoted the owner of The Denver Post as saying he had enormous respect for the firm. But most of them also had a stake in the communities their papers served, which meant that, if nothing else, their egos were wrapped up in putting out a respectable product. Alden, which already owned one-third of . 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 . 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. Media . 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. The shows premise pits two couples against each other for the chance to win a home. 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. [2][3] By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers. Heath Freeman in an undated photo provided by Goldin Solutions . 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. For Freeman, newspapers are financial assets and nothing morenumbers to be rearranged on spreadsheets until they produce the maximum returns for investors. 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 . 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. 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. Longtime Tribune staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister. One researcher tells me that if that money were invested in the S&P 500 Index Fund, it would have earned roughly $11 million over the same period. 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. Lee's board of directors . 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. 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. 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. The question was how. Alden is not a newspaper company, says Ann Marie Lipinski, a former editor in chief of the Chicago Tribune. 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. 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. Read: What we lost when Gannett came to town. The California Public Employees Retirement System, a few European banks, and Citigroup and Coca Cola Companys pension funds have all invested in Alden, along with charities such as the Circle of Service Foundation and the Alfred University Endowment. 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 . 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. Its not the name or the flag., He may get his wish. 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. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith. 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. To him, its the same as oil, the publisher said. Tuesday, 23 November 2021 07:46 PM EST. He used his own money to pull court records, and went years without going on a vacation. About a month after The Baltimore Sun was acquired by Alden, a senior editor at the paper took questions from anxious reporters on Zoom. It has filed a lawsuit in its bid to buy out news publisher Lee Enterprises. 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. Traditional newspaper business model says you make 95% of your money off ad sales and the rest off subscriptions. And everyone knows its going to run dry.. But there are some clues here and there. 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. Glidden, then a mild-mannered 30-year-old, had come to journalism later in life than most and was eager to prove himself. Alden currently owns 32%. 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. Soon, Tribune-owned newsrooms across the country were kicking off similar campaigns. [2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman. His editor cited a supposed journalistic infraction (Glidden had reported the resignation of a school superintendent before an agreed-upon embargo). Alden Global Capital is a hedge fund based in Manhattan, New York City. Even in a declining industry, the newspapers still generated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues; many of them were turning profits. Randy claims no editorial role in the Press, and his investment in the projectwhich has little chance of producing the kind of return hes accustomed tocould be chalked up to brotherly loyalty. Misinformation proliferates. Theyre being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. 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 newspaper lost a quarter of its staff to buyouts after it was acquired by Alden Global Capital in May. 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. AP. We were in collective revolt, Lillian Reed, a Sun reporter who helped organize the campaign, told me. 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. In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. With aggressive cost-cutting, Alden can operate its newspapers at a profit for years while turning out a steadily worse product, indifferent to the subscribers its alienating. After college he worked at Hudson Studio, Art Foundry in Niverville, NY . So Freeman pivoted. It . 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. Unless the Tribunes trajectory changes, Chicago may soon provide a grim case study. Hellman and BNP together own 46.4 per cent of Allfunds' shares. They are also defined by an obsessive secrecy. The largest share of the blame was assigned to the Tribune board for allowing the sale to Alden to go through. 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. 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 . On March 9, 2020, a small group of Baltimore Sun reporters convened a secret meeting at the downtown Hyatt Regency. 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%. Shortly after the Tribune deal closed earlier this year, I began trying to interview the men behind Alden Capital. 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. [30], Alden Global Capital includes a real estate division called Twenty Lake Holdings, which primarily buys excess real estate from newspapers. ", "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? 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 . Feb. 16, 2021 8:04 PM PT. 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. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D.