{"id":12792,"date":"2021-11-25T02:27:58","date_gmt":"2021-11-25T10:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=12792"},"modified":"2021-11-29T02:29:28","modified_gmt":"2021-11-29T10:29:28","slug":"a-secretive-hedge-fund-is-gutting-newsrooms-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=12792","title":{"rendered":"“A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms”, The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

By McKay Coppins, Cover Story, November Issue<\/p>\n

The tribune tower <\/span>rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of Gothic spires and flying buttresses that were designed to exude power and prestige. When plans for the building were announced in 1922, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime owner of the Chicago Tribune<\/i>, said he wanted to erect \u201cthe world\u2019s most beautiful office building\u201d for his beloved newspaper. The best architects of the era were invited to submit designs; lofty quotes about the Fourth Estate were selected to adorn the lobby. Prior to the building\u2019s completion, McCormick directed his foreign correspondents to collect \u201cfragments\u201d of various historical sites\u2014a brick from the Great Wall of China, an emblem from St. Peter\u2019s Basilica\u2014and send them back to be embedded in the tower\u2019s facade. The final product, completed in 1925, was an architectural spectacle unlike anything the city had seen before\u2014\u201cromance in stone and steel,\u201d as one writer described it. A century later, the Tribune Tower has retained its grandeur. It has not, however, retained the Chicago Tribune<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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Dan Winters for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n

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To find the paper\u2019s current headquarters one afternoon in late June, I took a cab across town to an industrial block west of the river. After a long walk down a windowless hallway lined with cinder-block walls, I got in an elevator, which deposited me near a modest bank of desks near the printing press. The scene was somehow even grimmer than I\u2019d imagined. Here was one of America\u2019s most storied newspapers\u2014a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes\u2014reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.<\/p>\n

Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune<\/i> these days, and you\u2019ll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? <\/i>On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. This is the story we\u2019ve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and it\u2019s not without truth. But what\u2019s happening in Chicago is different.<\/p>\n

In May, the Tribune <\/i>was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country. The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.<\/p>\n

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Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn\u2019t manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the state\u2019s undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter who\u2019d helped expose the governor\u2019s offshore shell companies. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone.<\/p>\n

The hollowing-out of the Chicago Tribune<\/i> was noted in the national press, of course. There were sober op-eds and lamentations on Twitter and expressions of disappointment by professors of journalism. But outside the industry, few seemed to notice. Meanwhile, the Tribune<\/i>\u2019s remaining staff, which had been spread thin even before Alden came along, struggled to perform the newspaper\u2019s most basic functions. After a powerful Illinois state legislator resigned amid bribery allegations, the paper didn\u2019t have a reporter in Springfield to follow the resulting scandal. And when Chicago suffered a brutal summer crime wave, the paper had no one on the night shift to listen to the police scanner.<\/p>\n

Read: What we lost when Gannett came to town<\/a><\/p>\n

As the months passed, things kept getting worse. Morale tanked; reporters burned out. The editor in chief mysteriously resigned, and managers scrambled to deal with the cuts. Some in the city started to wonder if the paper was even worth saving. \u201cIt makes me profoundly sad to think about what the Trib<\/i> was, what it is, and what it\u2019s likely to become,\u201d says David Axelrod, who was a reporter at the paper before becoming an adviser to Barack Obama. Through it all, the owners maintained their ruthless silence\u2014spurning interview requests and declining to articulate their plans for the paper. Longtime Tribune<\/i> staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister.<\/p>\n

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Ricardo Rey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not as if the Tribune<\/i> is just withering on the vine despite the best efforts of the gardeners,\u201d Charlie Johnson, a former Metro reporter, told me after the latest round of buyouts this summer. \u201cIt\u2019s being snuffed out, quarter after quarter after quarter.\u201d We were sitting in a coffee shop in Logan Square, and he was still struggling to make sense of what had happened. The Tribune<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think that\u2019s honestly a misnomer,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cA vulture doesn\u2019t hold a wounded animal\u2019s head underwater. This is predatory.”<\/p>\n

When alden first <\/span>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\u2014at least someone <\/i>wanted to buy them. Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. One early article<\/a>, in the trade publication Poynter<\/i>, suggested that Alden\u2019s interest in the local-news business could be seen as \u201cflattering\u201d and quoted the owner of The Denver Post <\/i>as saying he had \u201cenormous respect\u201d for the firm. Reading these stories now has a certain horror-movie quality: You want to somehow warn the unwitting victims of what\u2019s about to happen.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s easy to romanticize past eras of journalism. The families that used to own the bulk of America\u2019s local newspapers\u2014the Bonfilses of Denver, the Chandlers of Los Angeles\u2014were never perfect stewards. 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.<\/p>\n