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Hedge fund reaches $630m deal to buy remaining Tribune Publishing newspapers | Newspapers


The Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and other newspapers across the US are set to be sold to a hedge fund notorious for cutting newsrooms, in the latest blow to American journalism.

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 $630m to acquire the entire company.

News of the deal, expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2021, prompted dismay from journalists online – including those employed by Tribune Publishing. Alden’s track record of newspaper ownership has seen it become reviled across the journalism industry. The Denver Post has infamously suffered at the hands of the New York-based hedge fund, and the newspaper’s newsroom shrank by 70% over a seven-year period.

“Absolutely terrible news,” Gregory Pratt, a city hall reporter at the Tribune, wrote on Twitter, while Daniela Altimari, a reporter at the Courant, called the news a “gut punch”.

Others criticized Tribune for the deal, with Emily Brindley, a reporter at the Courant, tweeting: “This just didn’t have to happen.”

Brindley wrote: “The Courant is a powerhouse, a Connecticut institution with both a storied history and impressive young talent.@tribpub could’ve done right by us, or they could’ve sold us to a local owner. They’ve chosen instead to throw us to the wolves.”

The Chicago Tribune reported that the deal will see Alden take control of the Tribune, the Daily News, and the Courant, the Orlando Sentinel, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, the Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia, and the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia.

Tribune Publishing also owns the Baltimore Sun, but Alden has agreed to sell the newspaper to a non-profit in Maryland.

Alden already owns some 200 publications through its operating company, MediaNews Group, and many of those newspapers have seen punishing financial restrictions.

“Media observers note that they make cuts almost from day one. Pens and notebooks disappear from newsrooms. One newsroom was missing hot water. Then newspaper buildings are sold, and staff is consolidated and cut,” Savannah Jacobson, a contributor to the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote in a profile of Alden last year.

“Despite earning higher profits than is typical in the industry, the NewsGuild says that between 2012 and 2019, Alden cut 71% of jobs in the hedge fund’s Guild-represented newsrooms.”

The News Guild, the largest union of journalists in the US, joined in the criticism, with Jon Schleuss, the Guild’s president, calling the Alden move: “A terrible deal for the company, the workers, the shareholders and our democracy. Alden is only interested in extreme short-term profits by cutting everything to the bone. They have no long-term plan.”

The former Tribune writer Dawn Rhodes, now a senior editor at the reader-supported newsroom Block Club Chicago, writes that “hedge funds, and especially Alden Global Capital, have no business in news media”.

“Their track record speaks for itself,” Rhodes said on Twitter. “I really feel for all the journalists and readers who will shoulder this fallout. It’s horrible for them and it’s bad for all the local media landscapes.”

As part of the deal the Baltimore Sun will be sold to Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit controlled by a local philanthropist. That deal follows a Maryland-based campaign in 2020 which called for the Tribune to sell the newspaper.

News of the Alden agreement comes after scores of newspapers announced layoffs, and several printed their last editions, over the past few months, as coronavirus caused the economic downturn.

Even before the virus outbreak, however, journalism was in a perilous state. About 1,800 newspapers closed between 2004 and 2018, as the number of people buying print editions dropped, and Google and Facebook gobbled up the digital advertising that was barely keeping news organizations afloat.





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