In December, Alden Global Capital, a New York City hedge fund and media investor, confirmed, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, that it was looking to acquire Tribune Publishing, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Hartford Courant, as well as other local newspapers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Florida. Tribune already counted Alden as its largest shareholder; Alden was offering $14.25 per share to take full control of the company. Yesterday, following weeks of wrangling, Tribune announced its intention to sell to Alden at $17.25 per share. The deal as a whole is valued at $630 million, and would take Tribune private. Alden has become notorious—and widely reviled—for its tactic of ruthlessly slashing costs at its existing media properties; in 2018, staffers at the Denver Post, where management had just moved to cut thirty jobs, assailed their owners as “vultures” in an editorial that resonated across the media industry. “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,” CJR’s Savannah Jacobson 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 percent of jobs in the hedge fund’s Guild-represented newsrooms.” (In their rare public... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2021-02-17 13:33:35 UTC ]