Hedge Fund Reaches a Deal to Buy Tribune Publishing

Alden’s deal is almost certain to be opposed by many employees in Tribune Publishing newsrooms. It is also likely to invite fresh criticism from newspaper readers and press advocates who have noted the decline in local reporting — a development that has coincided with the rise of conspiracy theories in American public life.

Like many newspaper chains, Tribune Publishing has struggled. Since Alden took its 32 percent stake, the company has offered buyouts to employees across the country while trying to stave off the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on an already distressed industry.

Last year, after most newspaper employees had been working remotely for months, Tribune Publishing announced that it had permanently closed the physical newsrooms of The Daily News; The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa.; The Orlando Sentinel; The Carroll County Times in Westminster, Md.; The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md.; and The Hartford Courant.

Journalists at several Tribune newspapers have formed unions in the last three years, most recently at The Daily News. The organizing effort has come partly in response to the struggles of Tribune Publishing, which was taken private by the investor Sam Zell in 2007 and filed for bankruptcy the next year. It survived, but in 2010 the chief executive, Randy Michaels, was ousted amid reports of an inappropriate workplace culture.

In 2016, Tribune Publishing’s newspaper arm rebranded itself with a puzzling new name that has since fallen away — Tronc, an abbreviation of “Tribune online content.” Company leadership warred with newsroom employees at The Los Angeles Times until Tribune Publishing offloaded the paper in 2018 to Dr. Soon-Shiong and Ms. Chan. The same year, Tribune halved the staff of The Daily News, once the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper.

Last year, in another sign of the financial industry’s growing influence on the news media, McClatchy — the publisher of The Sacramento Bee, The Miami Herald and more than two dozen other news outlets — became the property of Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey hedge fund, in a bankruptcy auction. Before the auction, McClatchy had been owned by the same family since 1857.

Alden, which also has a significant minority stake in Lee Enterprises, the publisher of some 75 dailies across the country, had set its sights on both Gannett and McClatchy, but its bids fell short.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/business/media/alden-tribune-newspaper-sale.html