As a secretive hedge fund guts its newspapers, journalists are fighting back

Demoralized by rounds of job cuts, journalists at San Jose’s Mercury News and East Bay Times in Oakland, Calif., took their case to the public last month. At a rally in Oakland, they handed out a fact sheet detailing the “pillaging” of their papers, accompanied by a cartoon of a business executive trying to milk an emaciated cow.

“Dude! I’d produce more milk if you fed me!” read the caption.

The drawing was a barely veiled swipe at the newspapers’ majority owner, a little-known hedge fund called Alden Global Capital.

Headquartered in New York with investment funds domiciled in the tax-lenient Cayman Islands and a clientele that is mostly foreign, Alden has been investing in American newspapers since 2009. Through its majority control of a management company called Digital First Media, Alden owns nearly 100 daily and weekly papers, including such big-city dailies as the Mercury News, the Denver Post and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The company’s holdings are notably concentrated in California, where it effectively owns every major newspaper around Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area with the exception of the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The privately held company — so publicity-shy that its entire website consists of nothing more than its name over a glossy nature photograph — has gained adverse attention of late from an unlikely source: its own newspapers and their journalists. As the cartoon illustrated, they accuse Alden of slashing jobs and sucking profits from the papers while starving them of the resources needed to cover their communities.

In an extraordinary rebellion last Sunday, the Denver Post devoted its editorial pages to series of commentaries about its parent company’s practices. “Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom,” the paper’s lead editorial said. “If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell the Post to owners who will.”

The San Jose and Oakland papers’ executive editor, Neil Chase, seconded the Denver Post’s rebuke on Tuesday. “Democracy cannot succeed without a healthy, free press,” he wrote in the Mercury News. “So the owners of the press must be committed to its vital role, even if it reduces their profit.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/as-a-secretive-hedge-fund-guts-its-newspapers-journalists-are-fighting-back/2018/04/12/8926a45c-3c10-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html

Wonder what foreigners are buying control of US newspapers through an opaque hedge fund?