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.). Its not the name or the flag., He may get his wish. Reinventing their papers could require years of false starts and fine-tuningand, most important, a delayed payday for Aldens investors. Feb. 16, 2021 8:04 PM PT. 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. Freeman was clearly aware of his reputation for ruthlessness, but he seemed to regard Aldens commitment to cost-cutting as a badge of honorthe thing that distinguished him from the saps and cowards who made up Americas previous generation of newspaper owners. The practical effect of the death of local journalism is that you get what weve had, he told me, which is a halcyon time for corruption and mismanagement and basically misrule.. Iowa-based Lee Enterprises asks investors to help fight off hedge fund Alden Global Capital. [30], Alden Global Capital includes a real estate division called Twenty Lake Holdings, which primarily buys excess real estate from newspapers. The scene was somehow even grimmer than Id imagined. Longtime Tribune staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister. The details of how Smith got to know him are opaque, but the resulting loyalty was evident. 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. A native of Vallejo, he was proud to work for his hometown paper. We were in collective revolt, Lillian Reed, a Sun reporter who helped organize the campaign, told me. That gave the journalists at the Sun a brief window to stop the sale from going through. 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. Baltimore has always had its problems, he told me. I sort of bully people around to get stuff done, he boasted to The Washington Post in 1985. Last week, Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund notorious for slashing costs at its local titles, came down on the No side of the question, with editorial boards at papers that it owns stating that they will no longer endorse candidates for governor, US senator, or president. "[28], In mid-February 2022, the Delaware court found in favor of Lee Enterprises. On the appointed afternoon, I dialed the number provided by his spokesperson and found myself talking to the most feared man in American newspapers. No response came back. Tips that he would never have time to investigate piled up on a legal pad he kept at his desk. 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 . "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. He used his own money to pull court records, and went years without going on a vacation. In a news release Monday, Alden said it sent Lee's board a letter with the offer. Neither man will ever be the guest of honor at the annual dinner for the Committee to Protect Journalistsand thats probably fine by them. It . [8][24] Tribune Publishing publishes nine major metropolitan dailies. [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. 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? Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. 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. She was writing about Aldens growing newspaper empire, and wanted to know what it was like to be the last news reporter in town. But within weeks, Bainum said, Alden tried to tack on a five-year licensing deal that would have cost him tens of millions more. 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. The men who devised this model are Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital. He said that he still appreciated their journalism, but that he couldnt speak for his corporate bosses. and our desire to support local newspapers over the long term." Alden said it wants to work Lee's board of . He declined to meet me in person or to appear on Zoom. At the end of last month, Alden Global Capital, a notorious newspaper-owning hedge fund, sought to stake its claim on one of the last newspaper chains it hasn't yet touched: Lee Enterprises, which owns 90 publications across the country.Alden, which currently owns six percent of Lee's stock, sent an unsolicited offer to purchase the newspaper chain for $24 per share. Nov. 22, 2021. Several years later, when Heath was still in his mid-20s, Smith co-founded Alden Global Capital with him, and eventually put him in charge of the firm. Next year, Bainum will launch The Baltimore Banner, an all-digital, nonprofit news outlet. But that would require slow, painstaking workand there are easier ways to make money. (Freeman denied this through a spokesperson.) When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. On Monday, Dail Alden is known for . But that's not true for all of them. Inside Alden Global Capital. It felt important. But the group that jumps out to me on the list is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. What happens next? Frustrated and worn out, Glidden broke down one day last spring when a reporter from The Washington Post called. It is the nations second-largest newspaper owner by circulation. Alden is not a newspaper company, says Ann Marie Lipinski, a former editor in chief of the Chicago Tribune. [12] Lee owns daily newspapers in 77 markets in 26 states, and about 350 weekly and specialty publications. Tuesday, 23 November 2021 07:46 PM EST. Freeman was only slightly more accessible. The Banner will launch with about 50 journalistsnot far from the size of the Sunand an ambitious mandate. The most promising prospect materialized in Baltimore, where a hotel magnate named Stewart Bainum Jr. expressed interest in the Sun. Its being snuffed out, quarter after quarter after quarter. We were sitting in a coffee shop in Logan Square, and he was still struggling to make sense of what had happened. Collectively, they control about one-half of daily newspapers in the U.S. ), Crucially, the profits generated by Aldens newspapers did not go toward rebuilding newsrooms. 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. But even for a group of journalists, it was tough to keep the publics attention. 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). 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. 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. "And what we've seen in a lot of these places where newspapers have been scaled back or even closed is there really is no comparable product in place, whether it's by the government or by another news organization, to do what these local newspapers have done for hundreds of years.". Margaret Sullivan: The Constitution doesnt work without local news. 'Vulture' Fund Alden Global, Known For Slashing Newsrooms, Buys Tribune Papers, Stop The Presses! Even as Aldens portfolio grew, Freeman rarely visited his newspapers. Alden completed its takeover of the Tribune papers in May. The movement gained traction in some markets, with local politicians and celebrities expressing solidarity. MNG Enterprises, Inc., doing business as Digital First Media and MediaNews Group, is a Denver, Colorado -based newspaper publisher owned by Alden Global Capital. Connecting this to the current state of American newspaper ownership seems rather tenuous.. [22] The appointees to the MediaNews board were replaced by new directors representing the stockholders group led by 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. Its hard to imagine theyd show, anyway. Even in a declining industry, the newspapers still generated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues; many of them were turning profits. 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. Prior to the buildings completion, McCormick directed his foreign correspondents to collect fragments of various historical sitesa brick from the Great Wall of China, an emblem from St. Peters Basilicaand send them back to be embedded in the towers facade. 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. [2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman. 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). Maybe theyd cancel their subscriptions eventually; maybe the papers would fold altogether. 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. 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. For Freeman and his investors to come out ahead, they didnt need to worry about the long-term health of the assetsthey just needed to maximize profits as quickly as possible. Orders for non-defence capital goods excluding aircraft a closely watched proxy for business investment, rose 0.8 per cent in January from a month earlier, comfortably above economists . Shareholders of Tribune Publishing, one of the country's largest newspaper chains, on Friday approved a takeover by hedge fund Alden Global Capital. On . 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. Even in the greed is good climate of the era, Randy is a polarizing character on Wall Street. Eventually he was the only news reporter left on staff, charged with covering the citys police, schools, government, courts, hospitals, and businesses. A reporter at one of his newspapers suggested I try doorstepping Smithshowing up at his home unannounced to ask questions from the porch. It was all about the next quarters profit margins, says Matt DeRienzo, who worked as a publisher for Aldens Connecticut newspapers before finally resigning. 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. Heath Freeman, president of Alden Global Capital, is known for pushing big cost reductions, which he says help to save newspapers. Of course, its easy to romanticize past eras of journalism. [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. Earnest and unpolished, with a perpetually mussed mop of hair, Bainum presented himself as a contrast to the cutthroat capitalists at Alden. By the charitys own accounting, it lost $ 2.3 million in book value on a $17 million investment that year. AP. He says he visited the Tribune's office and was "really shocked by how grim the scene was." '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.

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