Who is alden global capital

As these anachronistic creatures declined, a new sort of predator emerged to bleed them. The hedge fund calculation is simple. Among the various financial players that are now pulling levers in the newspaper space, Alden holds the distinction of being the most repugnant to the journalism community.

Solomon Company, a boutique investment bank, before cofounding Alden Global Capital with elder hedge-funder Randall D. Few local journalists would know his face.

He has never toured the Post newsroom, despite the fact that DFM is headquartered in the same building. Freeman is said to be the kind of person who makes a demand, listens to the counterpoint, and then reasserts his demand.

He applies metrics to every decision, happily challenging the conventional wisdom of newspapering along the way: He has, for example, touted the cost benefits of using freelance writers rather than full-time staff.

In , the NewsGuild tried to get Duke to return all the money Freeman had donated to the university over the years, and to remove him as advisory board chair for Jewish Life. No dice. They want to find cash flow and bleed it to death. Brandt was with his wife and college-age son visiting his father and stepmother in nearby Sag Harbor when a light bulb flicked on in his head.

So Brandt, who had arrived with a notebook and some impromptu interview questions, did what any good reporter would do: He knocked on the door. A woman who appeared to be a housekeeper let him into the foyer, from which Brandt caught a glimpse of the semi-mythical Alden president walking across the second-floor balcony shirtless, with a small child in his arms.

Freeman took one look at Brandt and his NewsMatters shirt and signaled for the woman to show him back to the door. And that was that, although Brandt did at least get a photo of himself standing on the edge of the Freeman property. Cuts to the newsroom, advertising, and circulation departments of these papers seemed to come slowly at first. Staffers grew accustomed to receiving buyout offers twice a year, and there were usually always enough takers. If the police reporter who recently resigned is replaced, that would bring the headcount back up to eight.

The packages vary, but last year the New York Post pegged one such offer as 16 weeks of base pay for employees over We save newspapers and position them for a strong and profitable future so they can weather the secular decline. Both papers were left for dead and put into bankruptcy by their former owners, which could have caused a liquidation and a loss of all the jobs.

We improved operations and made them viable and profitable by providing them with new leadership, a seasoned executive team and a new strategy when others clearly had failed. But that feels like a fantasy.

Neil Chase, who now runs a nonprofit news organization called CalMatters , was executive editor of the Mercury News and East Bay Times between and August 10, Rick Edmonds.

July 1, Bad news: mass exits at the Chicago Tribune Almost 40 journalists at the Tribune are taking buyouts and leaving. June 23, Tom Jones. Kristen Hare. Angela Fu. Done deal, and a worrisome one, too, as Alden completes its Tribune purchase There are fears that the hedge fund will run its new papers as it has the ones it already owns — by slashing payroll and resources.

May 26, May 21, Alden Global Capital closes in on Tribune Publishing acquisition. Shareholders vote Friday. Longtime Tribune staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister. The Tribune had been profitable when Alden took over. The paper had weathered a decade and a half of mismanagement and declining revenues and layoffs, and had finally achieved a kind of stability. Now it might be facing extinction. This is predatory.

When Alden first started buying newspapers, at the tail end of the Great Recession, the industry responded with cautious optimism. These were not exactly boom times for newspapers, after all—at least someone wanted to buy them.

Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. They could be vain, bumbling, even corrupt. At their worst, they used their papers to maintain oppressive social hierarchies. But most of them also had a stake in the communities their papers served, which meant that, if nothing else, their egos were wrapped up in putting out a respectable product. The 21st century has seen many of these generational owners flee the industry, to devastating effect.

In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. Those that have survived are smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable to acquisition. Today, half of all daily newspapers in the U. What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate , jack up subscription prices , and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.

John Temple: My newspaper died 10 years ago. 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. This investment strategy does not come without social consequences. When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout , increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement.

Misinformation proliferates. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the election in places with limited access to local news. They are also defined by an obsessive secrecy. For two men who employ thousands of journalists, remarkably little is known about them.

You could look to Oakland, California, where the East Bay Times laid off 20 people one week after the paper won a Pulitzer. Or to nearby Monterey, where the former Herald reporter Julie Reynolds says staffers were pushed to stop writing investigative features so they could produce multiple stories a day.

But maybe the clearest illustration is in Vallejo, California, a city of about , people 30 miles north of San Francisco. When John Glidden first joined the Vallejo Times-Herald , in , it had a staff of about a dozen reporters, editors, and photographers. Glidden, then a mild-mannered year-old, had come to journalism later in life than most and was eager to prove himself. He started as a general-assignment reporter, covering local crime and community events.

The pay was terrible and the work was not glamorous, but Glidden loved his job. A native of Vallejo, he was proud to work for his hometown paper. It felt important. A month after he started, one of his fellow reporters left and Glidden was asked to start covering schools in addition to his other responsibilities. When the city-hall reporter left a few months later, he picked up that beat too. Now he was feeling the effects of their management.

Year after year, the executives from Alden would order new budget cuts, and Glidden would end up with fewer co-workers and more work. He gained pounds and started grinding his teeth at night. He used his own money to pull court records, and went years without going on a vacation. Tips that he would never have time to investigate piled up on a legal pad he kept at his desk. Meanwhile, with few newsroom jobs left to eliminate, Alden continued to find creative ways to cut costs.

Layout design was outsourced to freelancers in the Philippines. Frustrated and worn out, Glidden broke down one day last spring when a reporter from The Washington Post called. His editor cited a supposed journalistic infraction Glidden had reported the resignation of a school superintendent before an agreed-upon embargo.

But Glidden felt sure he knew the real reason: Alden wanted him gone. A young man named Randall Duncan Smith—Randy for short—stands next to his wife, Kathryn, answering quick-fire trivia questions in front of a live studio audience. A Cornell grad with an M. He scores big with a bankrupt aerospace manufacturer, and again with a Dallas-based drilling company.

By the s, this strategy has made Randy luxuriously wealthy—vacations in the French Riviera, a family compound outside New York City—and he has begun to school his children on the wonders of capitalism. Caleb will later recall, in an interview with D Magazine , asking his dad why he works so hard. Around this time, Randy becomes preoccupied with privacy. He stops talking to the press, refuses to be photographed, and rarely appears in public.

Most of his investments are defined by a cold pragmatism, but he takes a more personal interest in the media sector. With his own money, he helps his brother launch the New York Press , a free alt-weekly in Manhattan. In conversations with former Alden employees, I heard repeatedly that their partnership seemed to transcend business. The details of how Smith got to know him are opaque, but the resulting loyalty was evident.