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. He used his own money to pull court records, and went years without going on a vacation. [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.
Is this company saving newspapers or profiting from their demise? - The ", "Hedge Fund Reaches a Deal to Buy Tribune Publishing", "Opinion - Will The Chicago Tribune Be the Next Newspaper Picked to the Bone? The Tribune had been profitable when Alden took over. The men killing Americas newspapers, how Slack upended the workplace, and the new meth. But Glidden felt sure he knew the real reason: Alden wanted him gone. Three days later, Bainumstill smarting from his experience with Alden, but worried about the Suns fatesent a pride-swallowing email to Freeman. hide caption. "[17] and Vanity Fair dubbed Alden the "grim reaper of American newspapers. When the journalists created a Slack channel to coordinate their efforts across multiple newspapers, they dubbed it Project Mayhem.. Senior lenders under the deal were to swap debt for stock. 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.
(PDF) Extractive Imperialism in the Americas | henry veltmeyer About a month after The Baltimore Sun was acquired by Alden, a senior editor at the paper took questions from anxious reporters on Zoom. The newspaper lost a quarter of its staff to buyouts after it was acquired by Alden Global Capital in May. I put the question to Freeman, but he declined to answer on the record. (Freeman has, in the past, disputed Bainums account of the negotiations.) But in the meantime, there isn't really anything that can fill the hole these newspapers will leave if they're shut down. "[28], In mid-February 2022, the Delaware court found in favor of Lee Enterprises. 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. 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. He had spoken on this issue before, and it was easy to see why. Coordinated by . Feb 16, 2021 at 8:05 pm. Read: What we lost when Gannett came to town. But this acquisition was profound, making Alden Global . By McKay Coppins. 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. They want to know who exactly profits when we learn, as Harvard Nieman Labs Ken Doctor recently reported, that the firm netted $160 million last year from its Digital First Media newspapers. For Smith, the Palm Beach conservative and Trump ally, sticking it to the mainstream media might actually be a perk of Aldens strategy. "[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. The bid by Alden Global Capital, which already owns about 200 local newspapers, had faced resistance from Tribune staff and last-ditch competition. But outside the industry, few seemed to notice. 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.). 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 . There were sober op-eds and lamentations on Twitter and expressions of disappointment by professors of journalism. 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. ", "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? He says he visited the Tribune's office and was "really shocked by how grim the scene was." They are also defined by an obsessive secrecy. 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. Glidden had heard rumblings about the papers owners when he first took the job, but he hadnt paid much attention.
qhhsubiquity.com Informacin detallada del sitio web y la empresa [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. They could be vain, bumbling, even corrupt. That may well be the future of local news, he says. Next year, Bainum will launch The Baltimore Banner, an all-digital, nonprofit news outlet. The $633 million sale made Alden the nation's second largest newspaper owner in terms of circulation, with more than 200 newspapers. 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. The company has been growing its portfolio and as of May 2021, owns over 100 newspapers and 200 assorted other publications. October 14, 2021. It's a tangled tale but essentially Asylum produced a film for the McDonald's charitable foundation for Leo. 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.. Lee Enterprises owns 77 daily newspapers, including the Buffalo News, Omaha World-Herald and the Tulsa World. 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. I felt like a terrible reporter because I couldnt get to everything..
Live news: US manufacturing sector contracts for fourth straight month People who know him described Freemanwith his shellacked curls, perma-stubble, and omnipresent smirkas the archetypal Wall Street frat boy. When the city-hall reporter left a few months later, he picked up that beat too. 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. [2] [3] By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers. 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. Neither man will ever be the guest of honor at the annual dinner for the Committee to Protect Journalistsand thats probably fine by them. Dec 9, 2021. The New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital - known for slashing its newspapers' budgets to extract escalated profits - won shareholder approval Friday for its $633 million bid to acquire the Tribune Publishing newspaper chain.. Now it might be facing extinction. [10] With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late May 2021, Alden is collectively the second-largest owner of newspapers in the United States, as calculated by average daily print circulation, second only to Gannett. On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Baltimore is an underdog town, Liz Bowie, a Sun reporter who was at the meeting, told me. 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 .
Alden Global Capital, the Hedge Fund Killing Newspapers - The Atlantic That gave the journalists at the Sun a brief window to stop the sale from going through.
Alden Global Capital is buying and gutting local newspapers : NPR - NPR.org When he did, he exhibited a casual contempt for the journalists who worked there. "Local newspaper brands and operations are the engines that power trusted local news in communities across the United States," Heath Freeman, president of Alden Global Capital, said in a . 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 rationale offered by the board was, Consistent with its fiduciary duties, Lees Board has taken this action to ensure our shareholders receive fair treatment, full transparency and protection in connection with Aldens unsolicited proposal to acquire Lee. Shortly after the Tribune deal closed earlier this year, I began trying to interview the men behind Alden Capital. A more honest argument might have claimed, as some economists have, that vulture funds like Alden play a useful role in creative destruction, dismantling outmoded businesses to make room for more innovative insurgents. 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. Soon, Tribune-owned newsrooms across the country were kicking off similar campaigns. Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. 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.
Hedge fund Alden in hunt for another big newspaper chain 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. It is the nations second-largest newspaper owner by circulation. Coppins describes Alden as a specific type of firm: a "vulture hedge fund." 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 . California biotech billionaire and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns 24%, These include the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and The Baltimore Sun. 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. And two, by at least 2013, those of us who worked at Alden-controlled papers (like me) were already experiencing the slashing and burning. Other records turned up from public pension funds and filings of publicly traded companies. 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. Stewart Bainum, since losing his bid for the Sun, has been quietly working on a new venture. It will rely initially on philanthropic donations, but he aims to sell enough subscriptions to make it self-sustaining within five years. 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. His editor cited a supposed journalistic infraction (Glidden had reported the resignation of a school superintendent before an agreed-upon embargo).
Alden Global Capital makes offer for Lee Enterprises, owner of Winston Some publications, such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, have developed successful long-term models that Aldens papers might try to follow. These papers would have been liquidated if not for us stepping up.. The story of Alden Capital begins on the set of a 1960s TV game show called Dream House. Some have even suggested that this represents Americas last chance to save its local-news industry. Inside Alden Global Capital. Otherwise, youre just peeing in the ocean.. 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. The shows premise pits two couples against each other for the chance to win a home.
Why Chicago Tribune Staffers Are Terrified Of Their Hedge Fund - Forbes The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of . [7][8] Alden's purchase price was $635 million, or $17.25 per share. Financially, it was a raw deal. [30], Alden Global Capital includes a real estate division called Twenty Lake Holdings, which primarily buys excess real estate from newspapers. [4] [5] The company added more newspapers to its portfolio in May 2021 when it purchased Tribune . That's because the fund is stepping in to buy and then gut newsrooms across the country. Aldens calculus was simple.
How this 'vulture' hedge fund's gutting of local newsrooms could hurt Smith & Company. She was writing about Aldens growing newspaper empire, and wanted to know what it was like to be the last news reporter in town. 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. The families that used to own the bulk of Americas local newspapersthe Bonfilses of Denver, the Chandlers of Los Angeleswere never perfect stewards. It has filed a lawsuit in its bid to buy out news publisher Lee Enterprises. 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. He writes a weekly column called Mugger that savages the citys journalists by name and frequently runs to 10,000 words. 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. But in the case of local news, nothing comparable is ready to replace these papers when they die. 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.
Alden Global Capital pushes to reshape Lee Enterprises board The newsroom was moved to a single room rented from the local chamber of commerce. 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. 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. This is a subscription-based business..
Digital First Media - Wikipedia Lee Enterprises holds off an Alden takeoverfor now 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. The Ubiquity - The student news site of Quartz Hill High School 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.
Hedge fund Alden Global Capital in hunt for big newspaper chain Lee Several interim executive positions were also filled by people related to Alden or its parent, Smith Management LLC.[23]. [4], Alden purchased a 5.9-percent stake in Lee Enterprises in January 2020. 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 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. Newspapers Affect Us, Often In Ways We Don't Realize, 'Project Mayhem': Reporters Race To Save Tribune Papers From 'Vulture' Fund. 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. Alden-owned newspapers have cut their staff at twice the rate of their competitors, for all of Tribune Publishings newspapers, security company that trained Saudi operatives. Theres no industry that I can think of more integral to a working democracy than the local-news business, he said. The paper had weathered a decade and a half of mismanagement and declining revenues and layoffs, and had finally achieved a kind of stability. What most concerns him is how his city will manage without a robust paper keeping tabs on the people in charge. I would know he didnt mean it, and he would know he didnt mean it, but he would at least go through the motions. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. 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. [3] [4] With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late . And that has consequences for democracy, as journalist McKay Coppins writes in The Atlantic. [4], In 2019, Alden attempted, but failed at, a hostile takeover of Gannett. In May, the Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country. 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. A look at Alden Global Capital is the cover story of the latest . In a press release Monday, Nov. 22, 2021 Alden said it sent Lee's board a letter with the offer. 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. Tuesday, 23 November 2021 07:46 PM EST. As a privately held hedge fund, Alden doesnt have to reveal much to the public. A search through nonprofit groups publicly available financial reports, commonly known as Form 990s, reveals that all kinds of organizations some surprising have invested their monies with Alden over the years.