what newspapers does alden global capital own

But within weeks, Bainum said, Alden tried to tack on a five-year licensing deal that would have cost him tens of millions more. What happens next? When hed agreed to the interview, Id expected him to say the things he was supposed to saythat the layoffs and buyouts were necessary but tragic; that he held local journalism in the highest esteem; that he felt a sacred responsibility to steer these newspapers toward a robust future. "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?" 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. Several interim executive positions were also filled by people related to Alden or its parent, Smith Management LLC.[23]. Alden currently owns 32%. Its hard to imagine theyd show, anyway. Bainum envisioned rebuilding the paperwhich, by 2020, was down to a single full-time statehouse reporteras a nonprofit. Another ex-publisher told me Freeman believed that local newspapers should be treated like any other commodity in an extractive business. [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. 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. The largest share of the blame was assigned to the Tribune board for allowing the sale to Alden to go through. 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 Ubiquity - The student news site of Quartz Hill High School But in the meantime, there isn't really anything that can fill the hole these newspapers will leave if they're shut down. Layout design was outsourced to freelancers in the Philippines. 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 . On Monday, Dail But outside the industry, few seemed to notice. Am I going to win against capitalism in America? This is the story weve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and its not without truth. October 14, 2021. 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. "[17] and Vanity Fair dubbed Alden the "grim reaper of American newspapers. Frustrated and worn out, Glidden broke down one day last spring when a reporter from The Washington Post called. Coppins notes that there's even some research indicating that city budgets increase as a result, because corruption and dysfunction can take hold without a newspaper to hold powerful people to account. Vallejo deserves better. A few weeks after the story came out, he was fired. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldnt manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the states undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter whod helped expose the governors offshore shell companies. He stops talking to the press, refuses to be photographed, and rarely appears in public. Now he was feeling the effects of their management. You need real capital to move the needle, he told me. Margaret Sullivan: The Constitution doesnt work without local news. 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. Alden completed its takeover of the Tribune papers in May. and our desire to support local newspapers over the long term." Alden said it wants to work Lee's board of . What exactly went wrong would become a point of bitter debate among the journalists involved in the campaigns. To industry observers, Aldens brazen model set it apart even from chains like Gannett, known for its aggressive cost-cutting. For two men who employ thousands of journalists, remarkably little is known about them. By McKay Coppins. "[26] Shortly thereafter, Alden Global, through its operating unit Strategic Investment Opportunities, filed a lawsuit in state court in Delaware against Lee Enterprises. The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of . 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. [12] Lee owns daily newspapers in 77 markets in 26 states, and about 350 weekly and specialty publications. But that's not true for all of them. Tribune Publishing last month approved a $630m takeover deal with Alden Global Capital. So Freeman pivoted. Newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises is asking its shareholders to help it fight off a hostile takeover . Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund known for gutting local newsrooms, is seeking to buy Lee Enterprises (LEE), a publicly traded company with a chain of daily newspapers and other publications . Im repulsed by the incestuous world of New York journalism, he tells New York magazine. Through it all, the owners maintained their ruthless silencespurning interview requests and declining to articulate their plans for the paper. Some in the city started to wonder if the paper was even worth saving. 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. It feels like were going up against capitalism now, Lillian Reed, the reporter who helped launch the Save Our Sun campaign, told me. 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.. The men who devised this model are Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital. MNG Enterprises, Inc., doing business as Digital First Media and MediaNews Group, is a Denver, Colorado -based newspaper publisher owned by Alden Global Capital. 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. 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. 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. 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. With his own money, he helps his brother launch the New York Press, a free alt-weekly in Manhattan. 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. 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 editor in chief mysteriously resigned, and managers scrambled to deal with the cuts. I would know he didnt mean it, and he would know he didnt mean it, but he would at least go through the motions. Even as Aldens portfolio grew, Freeman rarely visited his newspapers. 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. 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. It's newspaper-endorsement season again, and that means it's Should newspapers do endorsements?season again. In the for-profit news arena, Knight is spurring the digital transformation of local newsrooms through the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, Sherry said. 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. It was clear that they didnt care about this being a business in the future. I put the question to Freeman, but he declined to answer on the record. Longtime Tribune staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister. Next up: Chicago, Baltimore, and the New York Daily 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. After all, it has a long and venerable history of supporting local news. 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. But the group that jumps out to me on the list is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. I knew they almost never talked to reporters, but Randall Smith and Heath Freeman were now two of the most powerful figures in the news industry, and theyd gotten there by dismantling local journalism. That might sound like a losing formula, but these papers dont have to become sustainable businesses for Smith and Freeman to make money. Lee Enterprises owns 77 daily newspapers, including the Buffalo News, Omaha World-Herald and the Tulsa World. 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. In May, The Alden Global Capital a hedge fund, acquired Tribune Publishing TPCO for $633 million. 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.. And that has consequences for democracy, as journalist McKay Coppins writes in The Atlantic. The $633 million sale made Alden the nation's second largest newspaper owner in terms of circulation, with more than 200 newspapers. He says he visited the Tribune's office and was "really shocked by how grim the scene was." After a powerful Illinois state legislator resigned amid bribery allegations, the paper didnt have a reporter in Springfield to follow the resulting scandal. 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. Earnest and unpolished, with a perpetually mussed mop of hair, Bainum presented himself as a contrast to the cutthroat capitalists at Alden. Dec 9, 2021. Research shows that when local newspapers disappear or are dramatically gutted, communities tend to see lower voter turnout, increased polarization, a general erosion of civic engagement and an environment in which misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread more easily. Convinced that the Sun wont be able to provide the kind of coverage the city needs, he has set out to build a new publication of record from the ground up. 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. More to the point, Tribune Publishingwhich represents a substantial portion of Aldens titleswas profitable at the time of the acquisition. "[18], Alden received critical coverage from the editorial staff at the Denver Post, who described Alden Global Capital as "vulture capitalists" after multiple staff layoffs. Soon, Tribune-owned newsrooms across the country were kicking off similar campaigns. That may well be the future of local news, he says. 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. [2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman. They could be vain, bumbling, even corrupt. Unless the Tribunes trajectory changes, Chicago may soon provide a grim case study. 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. [10][19][20], The company has its origins in R.D. Alden gradually took control of the papers that would become DFM. After serving in the Carter administrations Treasury Department, Brian became widely knownand fearedin the 80s for his hard-line negotiating style. Other large shareholders include Californian asset manager Capital Group and UK fund manager Jupiter Asset Management. When the journalists created a Slack channel to coordinate their efforts across multiple newspapers, they dubbed it Project Mayhem.. Knight spokesman Andrew Sherry declined to answer any of those questions, saying instead, Our endowment investments support our grantmaking., We invested approximately one half of one percent of our endowment in an Alden fund between late 2009 and early 2014, he said via email. Iowa-based Lee Enterprises asks investors to help fight off hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Alden Capital's gutting of the Denver Post is the most discussed example of this, but there are many others. Today, we know that Knight, CalPERS and others no longer invest with Alden. 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. Media . [7][8] Alden's purchase price was $635 million, or $17.25 per share. Others pointed to Bainums financing partner, who pulled out of the deal at the 11th hour. When lawmakers pressed for details last year on who funds Alden, the company replied that there may be certain legal entities and organizational structures formed outside of the United States.. Freemans father, Brian, was a successful investment banker who specialized in making deals on behalf of labor unions. Feb 16, 2021 at 8:05 pm. 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. [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. 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. Have you heard of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital? Already the largest shareholder . Its the meanness and the elegance of the capitalist marketplace brought to newspapers, Doctor 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?. Smith & Company. Misinformation proliferates. In a news release Monday, Alden said it sent Lee's board a letter with the offer. 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. [4], Alden purchased a 5.9-percent stake in Lee Enterprises in January 2020. Caleb will later recall, in an interview with D Magazine, asking his dad why he works so hard. 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. Freeman, his 41-year-old protg and the president of the firm, would be unrecognizable in most of the newsrooms he owns. 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. He started as a general-assignment reporter, covering local crime and community events. [22] The appointees to the MediaNews board were replaced by new directors representing the stockholders group led by Alden Global Capital. Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune these days, and youll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? he asks. Probably not.. The Banner will launch with about 50 journalistsnot far from the size of the Sunand an ambitious mandate. That's because the fund is stepping in to buy and then gut newsrooms across the country. but sadly on a global scale there is hardly any independent news sources left currently. 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. 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. Alden Global Capital is a hedge fund based in Manhattan, New York City. 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. 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 . 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. I asked. "[28], In mid-February 2022, the Delaware court found in favor of Lee Enterprises. As a privately held hedge fund, Alden doesnt have to reveal much to the public. The Tribune had been profitable when Alden took over. 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. He said that he still appreciated their journalism, but that he couldnt speak for his corporate bosses. 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.). '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. But a sense of fatalism permeated the work. But that would require slow, painstaking workand there are easier ways to make money. 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.

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