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. There were sober op-eds and lamentations on Twitter and expressions of disappointment by professors of journalism. Alden Global Capital, the New York hedge fund that bought Tribune Publishing this year, said on Monday that it was making an offer for another big American newspaper chain, Lee . 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. 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. The 21st century has seen many of these generational owners flee the industry, to devastating effect. Alden Global Capital revealed a proposal Monday to purchase Lee Enterprise Inc. and its newspapers at $24 a share, casting alarm through the many newsrooms owned by Lee. If you want to know what its like when Alden Capital buys your local newspaper, you could look to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where coverage of local elections in more than a dozen communities falls to a single reporter working out of his attic and emailing questionnaires to candidates. Clearly, for Smith and Freeman, chop-shopping their newspapers paid off. [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. 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. And that has consequences for democracy, as journalist McKay Coppins writes in The Atlantic. Heath hopes the well never runs dry, but hes going to keep pumping until it does. In 2016 (year of the most recent 990 available), the foundation invested $17 million in Alden funds. The bid by Alden Global Capital, which already owns about 200 local newspapers, had faced resistance from Tribune staff and last-ditch competition. 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. 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. 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. Dec 9, 2021. Opinions - Help yourself. Is it ever okay to nick an idea? 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 . On Monday, Dail It feels like were going up against capitalism now, Lillian Reed, the reporter who helped launch the Save Our Sun campaign, told me. 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. Media . In 2011, Paton launched an ambitious initiative he called Project Thunderdome, hiring more than 50 journalists in New York and strategically deploying them to supplement short-staffed local newsrooms. [7][8] Alden's purchase price was $635 million, or $17.25 per share. Somehow, no one's buying it. Year after year, the executives from Alden would order new budget cuts, and Glidden would end up with fewer co-workers and more work. Well, that wasnt the point. But there are some clues here and there. Theres little evidence that Alden cares about the sustainability of its newspapers. One early article, in the trade publication Poynter, suggested that Aldens interest in the local-news business could be seen as flattering and quoted the owner of The Denver Post as saying he had enormous respect for the firm. The men killing Americas newspapers, how Slack upended the workplace, and the new meth. He writes a weekly column called Mugger that savages the citys journalists by name and frequently runs to 10,000 words. He had spoken on this issue before, and it was easy to see why. People who know him described Freemanwith his shellacked curls, perma-stubble, and omnipresent smirkas the archetypal Wall Street frat boy. 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. But in the meantime, there isn't really anything that can fill the hole these newspapers will leave if they're shut down. but sadly on a global scale there is hardly any independent news sources left currently. He was fired after criticizing Alden in a Washington Post interview. [21], Under the acquisition plan, MediaNews Group debt fell to $165 million from about $930 million. The new owners had announced a round of buyouts, some beloved staffers were leaving, and those who remained were worried about the future. Alden completed its takeover of the Tribune papers in May. 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. To industry observers, Aldens brazen model set it apart even from chains like Gannett, known for its aggressive cost-cutting. Bainum envisioned rebuilding the paperwhich, by 2020, was down to a single full-time statehouse reporteras a nonprofit. Lee's board of directors . Reading these stories now has a certain horror-movie quality: You want to somehow warn the unwitting victims of whats about to happen. Alden Global Capital had recently purchased a nearly one-third stake in the Suns parent company, Tribune Publishing, and the firm was signaling that it would soon come for the rest. Longtime Tribune staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister. Tips that he would never have time to investigate piled up on a legal pad he kept at his desk. . 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. The audio for this interview was produced by Ryan Benk and edited by Scott Saloway. Other records turned up from public pension funds and filings of publicly traded companies. 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 . I asked, What is the Foundations perspective on those investments now, as news of Aldens gutting of these newspapers has come to light?. Most responded with variations on the same question: Which recent stories from your newspapers have you especially appreciated? 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. But even for a group of journalists, it was tough to keep the publics attention. Alden Global Capital moves to buy Lee Enterprises, owner of the St 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 declined to meet me in person or to appear on Zoom. But that would require slow, painstaking workand there are easier ways to make money. 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. Its not the name or the flag., He may get his wish. No response came back. A vulture doesnt hold a wounded animals head underwater. Theres no industry that I can think of more integral to a working democracy than the local-news business, he said. In conversations with former Alden employees, I heard repeatedly that their partnership seemed to transcend business. This is a subscription-based business.. But years later, when Randy relocates to Palm Beach and becomes a major donor to Donald Trumps presidential campaign, it will make a certain amount of sense that his earliest known media investment was conceived as a giant middle finger to the journalistic establishment. October 14, 2021. Vallejo deserves better. A few weeks after the story came out, he was fired. Alden Global Capital pushes to reshape Lee Enterprises board He took particular pride in finding novel ways to give away his family fortune, funding child-poverty initiatives in Baltimore and prenatal care for women in Liberia. 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. Connecting this to the current state of American newspaper ownership seems rather tenuous.. On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. More to the point, Tribune Publishingwhich represents a substantial portion of Aldens titleswas profitable at the time of the acquisition. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith. about two hundred American newspapers. [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. 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 . 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. Below are highlights from his conversation with Morning Edition's A Martnez. It has filed a lawsuit in its bid to buy out news publisher Lee Enterprises. 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. To find the papers current headquarters one afternoon in late June, I took a cab across town to an industrial block west of the river. Caleb will later recall, in an interview with D Magazine, asking his dad why he works so hard. Earnest and unpolished, with a perpetually mussed mop of hair, Bainum presented himself as a contrast to the cutthroat capitalists at Alden. 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. If accepted, the $24 per share purchase price would . Live news: US manufacturing sector contracts for fourth straight month
Ferry Schedule Homer To Kodiak, Articles W