A Slow Death for Tribune Newspapers

The Evening Paper - Media, Culture and the Modern Condition

Another dark day for one of the largest newspaper publishers in the country.

Alden Global Capital is buying Tribune …… a publishing company whose papers include The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel, The New York Daily News, among others.

The deal is valued at six hundred thirty million dollars

Why all the gloom? It’s because of who the buyer is. The hedge fund’s nickname is the destroyer of newspapers. And last year Vanity Fair called Alden the “hedge fund vampire that bleeds newspapers dry.” CNN recently called it a “corporate strip miner”

Alden owns about 200 newspapers and often slashes newsroom budgets typically by cutting crucial reporters and editors.

And they’ve been aggressively expanding. In the last two years, the hedge fund attempted —— and failed to buy America’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, and the McClatchy chain

A post on News Guild dot org… the largest newspaper labor group…. calls the sale —- “a short-sighted view of the value of the company, and an utter disregard for the value of quality news coverage.”

CNN quotes Alden’s president Heath Freeman who says that's not so...

"The purchase of Tribune reaffirms our commitment to the newspaper industry, and our focus on getting publications to a place where they can operate sustainably over the long term."

And if Alden’s playbook for what it calls long teen success is the same... waves of layoffs are to come. Employees and former employees of alden newspapers say those layoffs happen at twice the rate of other newspapers. And the company gains twice the profit … of course.

All this speeds up the slow death of local papers in communities across the country.

A blow that tough to calculate until it’s gone and rarely replaced.

I’m James Brown and I good you bid night

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