Is Bleached Tripe Healthy, Scunthorpe United Shop Opening Times, Articles W

Alden's holdings already spanned the country, including the . 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. Interestingly, Smiths foundation didnt do well with its Alden investments in 2016. Lee Enterprises owns 77 daily newspapers, including the Buffalo News, Omaha World-Herald and the Tulsa World. 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. The 1% own and operate the . 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 . During its five-year run with Alden, it seems quite unlikely that no one at Knight knew about the hedge funds slash-and-burn strategy for two reasons. Now it might be facing extinction. In truth, Freeman didnt seem particularly interested in defending Aldens reputation. Chicago-based Tribune Publishing on Tuesday announced a proposed sale to hedge fund Alden Global Capital in a deal valued at $630 million. This investment strategy does not come without social consequences. It was like watching a slow-motion disaster, says Gregory Pratt, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. So why be surprised that Knight-Ridder or anyone else is investing in destructive but profitable ventures? Some publications, such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, have developed successful long-term models that Aldens papers might try to follow. He writes a weekly column called Mugger that savages the citys journalists by name and frequently runs to 10,000 words. ", "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? When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone. Others pointed to Bainums financing partner, who pulled out of the deal at the 11th hour. What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. Several interim executive positions were also filled by people related to Alden or its parent, Smith Management LLC.[23]. More to the point, Tribune Publishingwhich represents a substantial portion of Aldens titleswas profitable at the time of the acquisition. Most responded with variations on the same question: Which recent stories from your newspapers have you especially appreciated? The new owners had announced a round of buyouts, some beloved staffers were leaving, and those who remained were worried about the future. 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. Im worried the worst is yet to come. The firm has a history of purchasing newspapers to cut costs wherever . They were very tight. Freeman has resisted elaborating on his relationship with Smith, saying simply that they were family friends before going into business together. 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 . For Freeman, newspapers are financial assets and nothing morenumbers to be rearranged on spreadsheets until they produce the maximum returns for investors. 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. 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. Misinformation proliferates. 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. But that would require slow, painstaking workand there are easier ways to make money. If they did it right, Venetoulis said, they just might be able to line up a local, civic-minded owner for the paper. In the face of that setback, Alden said it would turn to the tactic of filing a proxy statement asking the company's shareholders to vote no on board members Mary Junck and Herbert Moloney during the March 2022 board elections. By McKay Coppins. Much of the Knight family's once-grand newspaper empire was ultimately acquired by Alden Global Capital, while the family foundation invested in Alden funds. Coppins describes Alden as a specific type of firm: a "vulture hedge fund." With full control of Tribune Publishing, Alden Global Capital is scrambling to squeeze out a return on its $600 million investment in the struggling Chicago-based newspaper company. As the months passed, things kept getting worse. The $633 million sale made Alden the nation's second largest newspaper owner in terms of circulation, with more than 200 newspapers. On Monday, Dail The editor in chief mysteriously resigned, and managers scrambled to deal with the cuts. Scott Olson/Getty Images He studied art at Alfred University under sculptors Glenn Zweygardt and William Parry. 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. The purchase represents the culmination of Alden's years-long drive to take over the company and its storied titles . The pitch had a certain romantic appeal to the reporters in the room. . For those who cared about the future of local news, it was hard to imagine a better outcomewhich made it all the more devastating when the bid fell through. Baltimore has always had its problems, he told me. This story originally appeared on the Morning Edition live blog. Hes impressed by their journalism, he told me, but his clearest takeaway is that theyre not nearly well funded enough. This is a subscription-based business.. (Freeman denied this through a spokesperson.) But I had underestimated how little Aldens founders care about their standing in the journalism world. By the charitys own accounting, it lost $ 2.3 million in book value on a $17 million investment that year. Russ Smith is a puckish libertarian whose self-described contempt for the journalistic class animates the pages of the publication. While some finance reporters noted that Smiths newspaper investments were all losing value, none seemed to notice that Smith and Aldens president Heath Freeman would soon start strip mining their news companies real estate and other assets. 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. Theyre being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. So who is investing with them? But even for a group of journalists, it was tough to keep the publics attention. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital, known for making deep newsroom cuts, won approval to acquire Tribune Publishing, which includes the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and New York Daily News. The Banner will launch with about 50 journalistsnot far from the size of the Sunand an ambitious mandate. 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. At one point, he told me, the citys entire civil-service commission was abruptly fired without explanation; his sources told him something fishy was going on, but he knew hed never be able to run down the story. In budget meetings, according to the former executive, Freeman hectored local publishers, demanding that they produce detailed numbers off the top of their head and then humiliating them when they couldnt. Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. 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? Smith. 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 . 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 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. It has figured out how to make a profit by driving newspapers into the ground, he says, since Alden's aim is not to make them into long-term sustainable businesses but rather maximize profits quickly to show it has made a winning investment. To be sure, the Knight Foundation does much to help promote and sustain local news. Its not the name or the flag., He may get his wish. Knight began selling off its Alden holdings in 2012, and got completely out in 2014. Meanwhile, in Vallejo, John Glidden went from covering crime and community news to holding the title of the only hard news reporter in town, filling a legal pad with tips he knew he'd never have time to pursue. These include the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and The Baltimore Sun. My answer is its hard to know. [11], In November 2021, Alden Global Capital made an offer to purchase Lee Enterprises for $24 a share in cash, or about $141 million. Meanwhile, with few newsroom jobs left to eliminate, Alden continued to find creative ways to cut costs. It . But the group that jumps out to me on the list is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. 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 men who devised this model are Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital. 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. It wasn't the first newspaper acquisition for this hedge fund firm, nor is it the only firm of its kind eyeing the nation's newspapers. Freeman was only slightly more accessible. The Tribune Tower, the iconic former home of the Chicago Tribune, seen in Chicago, Illinois in 2015. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you . But he says the worst culprit is the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which bought the Mercury in 2011 and has since sold the paper's building and slashed newsroom staff by about 70%. 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 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. Youd be surprised. Alden, which has built a reputation as one of the newspaper industry's most aggressive cost-cutters, became Tribune Publishing's largest shareholder in November 2019 and owns a 31.3% stake. In recent months, hes been meeting with leaders of local-news start-ups across the countryThe Texas Tribune, the Daily Memphian, The City in New Yorkand collecting best practices. He says he visited the Tribune's office and was "really shocked by how grim the scene was." Traditional newspaper business model says you make 95% of your money off ad sales and the rest off subscriptions. The men killing Americas newspapers, how Slack upended the workplace, and the new meth. 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. I asked, What is the Foundations perspective on those investments now, as news of Aldens gutting of these newspapers has come to light?. Have you heard of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital? But in the case of local news, nothing comparable is ready to replace these papers when they die. by Magnus Shaw..An enormous advertising company (Leo Burnett) and a small creative film company (Asylum) have had a difficult couple of weeks. In February 2021, he announced a handshake deal to buy the Sun from Alden for $65 million once it acquired Tribune Publishing. As a privately held hedge fund, Alden doesnt have to reveal much to the public. 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. Most of his investments are defined by a cold pragmatism, but he takes a more personal interest in the media sector. 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. When the sale failed to attract a sufficiently high offer, Freeman turned his attention to squeezing as much cash out of the newspapers as possible. After Brian took his own life, in 2001, Smith became a mentor and confidant to Heath, who was in college at the time of his fathers death. These were not exactly boom times for newspapers, after allat least someone wanted to buy them. Meanwhile, the Tribunes remaining staff, which had been spread thin even before Alden came along, struggled to perform the newspapers most basic functions. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. Reinventing their papers could require years of false starts and fine-tuningand, most important, a delayed payday for Aldens investors. 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. The company has been growing its portfolio and as of May 2021, owns over 100 newspapers and 200 assorted other publications. When Alden first started buying newspapers, at the tail end of the Great Recession, the industry responded with cautious optimism. The Tribune had been profitable when Alden took over. Alden, which has built a reputation as one of the newspaper industry's most aggressive cost-cutters, became Tribune Publishing's largest shareholder in November 2019 and owns a 31.3% stake. 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. 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. 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. 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. Alden Global Capital already owns 200 publications and a 6% stake in Lee Enterprises. A reporter at one of his newspapers suggested I try doorstepping Smithshowing up at his home unannounced to ask questions from the porch. The bid by Alden Global Capital, which already owns about 200 local newspapers, had faced resistance from Tribune staff and last-ditch competition. Over the course of seven years, Alden doubled profits in its Bay Area News Group newspapers, another home to cutbacks. The newsroom was moved to a single room rented from the local chamber of commerce. Like many alumni of the Sun, Simon is steeped in the papers history. It's traded in a prestigious downtown newsroom for a "Chipotle-sized office" near the printing press. But this acquisition was profound, making Alden Global . Am I going to win against capitalism in America? But as long as Alden had made back its money, the investment would be a success. Probably not.. But that's not true for all of them. He had spoken on this issue before, and it was easy to see why. So Freeman pivoted. The scene was somehow even grimmer than Id imagined. "60 Minutes" correspondent Jon Wertheim did a strong piece that aired Sunday night about the grim state of local newspapers, in part because of how hedge funds, such as Alden Global Capital . In my many conversations with people who have worked with Freeman, not one could recall seeing him read a newspaper. It was clear that they didnt care about this being a business in the future. Researchers at the University of North Carolina found that Alden-owned newspapers have cut their staff at twice the rate of their competitors; not coincidentally, circulation has fallen faster too, according to Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst who reviewed data from some of the papers. What happens next? 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. The paper had weathered a decade and a half of mismanagement and declining revenues and layoffs, and had finally achieved a kind of stability. 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. The largest share of the blame was assigned to the Tribune board for allowing the sale to Alden to go through. But if you really started fucking up in grandiose and belligerent ways, if you started stealing and grifting and lying, eventually somebody would come up behind you and say, Youre grifting and youre lying and theyd put it in the paper., The bad stuff runs for so long now, he went on, that by the time you get to it, institutions are irreparable, or damn near close., Take away the newsroom packed with meddling reporters, and a city loses a crucial layer of accountability. After a powerful Illinois state legislator resigned amid bribery allegations, the paper didnt have a reporter in Springfield to follow the resulting scandal. But we dont know, because they arent saying. A century later, the Tribune Tower has retained its grandeur. But for Simon, that paper exists entirely in the past. NPR reached out to Alden for a response. In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. We were like, Theyre not going to take our newspaper from us! Frustrated and worn out, Glidden broke down one day last spring when a reporter from The Washington Post called. After a contentious presidential race and amid a still-raging pandemic, there was a limited supply of outrage and sympathy to spare for local reporters. Feb. 16, 2021 8:04 PM PT. The hollowing-out of the Chicago Tribune was noted in the national press, of course. 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. 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. The most promising prospect materialized in Baltimore, where a hotel magnate named Stewart Bainum Jr. expressed interest in the Sun. 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. Around this time, Randy becomes preoccupied with privacy. [29] This attempt also failed, as shareholders returned both directors to the Lee board despite Alden's opposition. Heath Freeman, president of Alden Global Capital, is known for pushing big cost reductions, which he says help to save newspapers. hide caption. But outside the industry, few seemed to notice. And that has consequences for democracy, as journalist McKay Coppins writes in The Atlantic. 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.). The details of how Smith got to know him are opaque, but the resulting loyalty was evident. 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.. You have no way of knowing that if you dont have some nosy son of a bitch asking a lot of questions down there, he told me. Next year, Bainum will launch The Baltimore Banner, an all-digital, nonprofit news outlet. Im repulsed by the incestuous world of New York journalism, he tells New York magazine. It was all about the next quarters profit margins, says Matt DeRienzo, who worked as a publisher for Aldens Connecticut newspapers before finally resigning. Randy claims no editorial role in the Press, and his investment in the projectwhich has little chance of producing the kind of return hes accustomed tocould be chalked up to brotherly loyalty. They want to know who exactly profits when we learn, as Harvard Nieman Lab's Ken Doctor recently reported, that the firm netted $160 million last year from its Digital First Media . For Smith, the Palm Beach conservative and Trump ally, sticking it to the mainstream media might actually be a perk of Aldens strategy. 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. Who Profits From Alden Global Capital? 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.. [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. Knight first reported its investment in Alden in 2010, noting the fair market value of its Alden holdings was $13.4 million. These papers were in many cases left for dead by local families not willing to make the tough but appropriate decisions to get these news organizations to sustainability. That may well be the future of local news, he says. 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. After all, it has a long and venerable history of supporting local news. Freeman never responded. [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. That's because the fund is stepping in to buy and then gut newsrooms across the country. Longtime Tribune staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister. To him, its the same as oil, the publisher said. "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?" He teaches his 8-year-old son, Caleb, to make trades on a Quotron computer, and imparts the value of delayed gratification by reportedly postponing his familys Christmas so that he can use all their available cash to buy stocks at lower prices in December. [4][13], In November 2021, Alden made an offer to Lee to purchase the company in its entirety for roughly $141 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.. He used his own money to pull court records, and went years without going on a vacation. They could be vain, bumbling, even corrupt. This is the story weve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and its not without truth. [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. 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 . Already the largest shareholder . 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 . Even in the greed is good climate of the era, Randy is a polarizing character on Wall Street. Tribune Publishing, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers, has agreed to be acquired by Alden Global Capital in a deal valued at $630 million . 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.