what newspapers does alden global capital own
MNG Enterprises, Inc., doing business as Digital First Media and MediaNews Group, is a Denver, Colorado -based newspaper publisher owned by Alden Global Capital. 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 . 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. 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? "[26] Shortly thereafter, Alden Global, through its operating unit Strategic Investment Opportunities, filed a lawsuit in state court in Delaware against Lee Enterprises. The hollowing-out of the Chicago Tribune was noted in the national press, of course. 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. 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. 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. One tagline he was considering was Marylands Best Newsroom., When I asked, half in jest, if he planned to raid the Sun to staff up, he responded with a muted grin. In addition to the constant layoffs, our buildings were being sold, basic office supplies became scarce and the hot water stopped working. [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. Misinformation proliferates. Shareholders of Tribune Publishing, one of the country's largest newspaper chains, on Friday approved a takeover by hedge fund 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. 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. 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. Reporters kept reporting, and editors kept editing, and the union kept looking for ways to put pressure on Alden. Financially, it was a raw deal. 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. When the journalists created a Slack channel to coordinate their efforts across multiple newspapers, they dubbed it Project Mayhem.. [3] [4] With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late . Alden Global Capital already owns 200 publications and a 6% stake in Lee Enterprises. 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. 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. hide caption. One known investor, however, is the Randall and Barbara Smith Foundation, named for Alden founder Smith and his wife. It . 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. The Banner will launch with about 50 journalistsnot far from the size of the Sunand an ambitious mandate. 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. She was writing about Aldens growing newspaper empire, and wanted to know what it was like to be the last news reporter in town. 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 . Longtime Tribune staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister. Former Knight-Ridder headquarters. Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. 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. But within weeks, Bainum said, Alden tried to tack on a five-year licensing deal that would have cost him tens of millions more. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. Coordinated by . And everyone knows its going to run dry.. If they did it right, Venetoulis said, they just might be able to line up a local, civic-minded owner for the paper. 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. Yes, today, it's a newspaper without a newsroom. 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. In a press release Monday, Nov. 22, 2021 Alden said it sent Lee's board a letter with the offer. ), Crucially, the profits generated by Aldens newspapers did not go toward rebuilding newsrooms. For Freeman, newspapers are financial assets and nothing morenumbers to be rearranged on spreadsheets until they produce the maximum returns for investors. "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?" Maybe theyd cancel their subscriptions eventually; maybe the papers would fold altogether. In May, The Alden Global Capital a hedge fund, acquired Tribune Publishing TPCO for $633 million. [2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman. Alden gradually took control of the papers that would become DFM. He told me it will begin with an annual operating budget of $15 million, unprecedented for an outfit of this kind. Some expressed exasperation with the staff of the Chicago Tribune, who were unable to find a single interested local buyer. 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. [29] This attempt also failed, as shareholders returned both directors to the Lee board despite Alden's opposition. 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. (Freeman has, in the past, disputed Bainums account of the negotiations.) But this acquisition was profound, making Alden Global . 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. After serving in the Carter administrations Treasury Department, Brian became widely knownand fearedin the 80s for his hard-line negotiating style. On . After all, it has a long and venerable history of supporting local news. Freeman was only slightly more accessible. 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 there was still a sliver of hope: Tribune and Alden agreed that the hedge fund would not increase its stake in the company for at least seven months. 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. We were like, Theyre not going to take our newspaper from us! A group of 11 community newspapers owned by Red Wing Publishing Co. have been sold to MediaNews Group, owner of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and more than 100 newspapers across the country. 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. Coppins offers several examples, like the Chicago Tribune and California's Vallejo Times-Herald. But for that to happen, the Big Tech money would need to flow to underfunded newsrooms, not into the pockets of Aldens investors. For Baltimore to avoid a similar fate, Simon told me, something new would have to come alonga spiritual heir to the Sun: A newspaper is its contents and the people who make it. Caleb will later recall, in an interview with D Magazine, asking his dad why he works so hard. 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. The families that used to own the bulk of Americas local newspapersthe Bonfilses of Denver, the Chandlers of Los Angeleswere never perfect stewards. 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 . Theres little evidence that Alden cares about the sustainability of its newspapers. "[25], In early December, the board of Lee unanimously rejected the Alden bid, saying that the Alden proposal "grossly undervalues Lee and fails to recognize the strength of our business today. 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.). 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. [30], Alden Global Capital includes a real estate division called Twenty Lake Holdings, which primarily buys excess real estate from newspapers. In conversations with former Alden employees, I heard repeatedly that their partnership seemed to transcend business. [4][5] The company added more newspapers to its portfolio in May 2021 when it purchased Tribune Publishing and became the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States. A native of Vallejo, he was proud to work for his hometown paper. By Julie Reynolds. 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. 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. Smith began investing in newspapers and media around the same time. It is the nations second-largest newspaper owner by circulation. '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. Alden, which owns more than 200 newspapers across the country, has developed a reputation for using extensive layoffs and severe cost cuts at the newspapers it owns. Who Profits From Alden Global Capital? 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. When he did, he exhibited a casual contempt for the journalists who worked there. So Freeman pivoted. [32], The company has been criticized for investing money for pensions of newspaper employees in funds it manages itself. 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. 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. 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. Ken Kelleher is an American sculptor. 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. We must finally require the online tech behemoths, such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, to fairly compensate us for our original news content, he told me. [2] [3] By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers. Smith, a reclusive Palm Beach septuagenarian, hasnt granted a press interview since the 1980s. Below are highlights from his conversation with Morning Edition's A Martnez. (Freeman denied this characterization through a spokesperson. They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think thats honestly a misnomer, Johnson said. Even in the greed is good climate of the era, Randy is a polarizing character on Wall Street. ", "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? Well, that wasnt the point. With his own money, he helps his brother launch the New York Press, a free alt-weekly in Manhattan. 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. Soon, Tribune-owned newsrooms across the country were kicking off similar campaigns. In 2016 (year of the most recent 990 available), the foundation invested $17 million in Alden funds. 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. [7][8] Alden's purchase price was $635 million, or $17.25 per share. To David Simon, the whimpering end of The Baltimore Sun feels both inevitable and infuriating. Many in the journalism industry, watching lawsuits play out in Australia and Europe, have held out hope in recent years that Google and Facebook will be compelled to share their advertising revenue with the local outlets whose content populates their platforms. 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.. That might sound like a losing formula, but these papers dont have to become sustainable businesses for Smith and Freeman to make money. To him, its the same as oil, the publisher said. He started as a general-assignment reporter, covering local crime and community events.
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