Alden Global Capital, LLC

Alden Global Capital, LLC Image source.
Corporate Information
Name	Alden Global Capital
Founded	2007
Founder	Randall D. Smith
Type	Privately held company (LLC)
Location	United States
Headquarters	New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Key people	Heath Freeman
Industry	Investment management
Services	Hedge funds
Controversies	Negative impact on newspapers Erosion of local news Vulture capitalists
Employees	15
Website	AldenGlobal.com

Background

Alden Global Capital, LLC is a hedge fund based in Manhattan, New York City. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith. Its managing director is Heath Freeman. By mid-2020, Alden Global Capital had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers. The company added more newspapers to its portfolio in May 2021 when it purchased Tribune Publishing and became the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States.

Alden Global Capital operates its media holdings through Digital First Media (DFM), which it acquired in 2010 after DMG's parent company, MediaNews Group, declared bankruptcy. With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late May 2021, Alden Global Capital is collectively the second-largest owner of newspapers in the United States, as calculated by average daily print circulation, second only to Gannett.

Particularly noteworthy newspapers in Alden Global Capital's portfolio include the Chicago Tribune,   The Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Boston Herald,   The Mercury News of San Jose, the East Bay Times,   The Orange County Register, and the Orlando Sentinel.

Alden Global Capital has a reputation for sharply cutting costs by reducing the number of journalists working on its newspapers. In March 2018, Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist for The Washington Post, called Alden Global Capital "one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism." and Vanity Fair dubbed Alden Global Capital the "grim reaper of American newspapers."

Alden Global Capital received critical coverage from the editorial staff at the The Denver Post, who described Alden Global Capital Global Capital as "vulture capitalists" after multiple staff layoffs.

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Additional Reading

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John Yang: Talk about that cost, both in the newsrooms and in the communities.

McKay Coppins: Yes. Well, I mean, look, there's a huge body of research that shows when a local newspaper either disappears or is significantly diminished, there are downstream effects on the communities they serve.

So, voter turnout drops. Misinformation spreads more easily. Civic engagement is lower. There is even evidence to suggest that city budgets get larger because there's more dysfunction and corruption without a bustling newsroom of reporters holding city hall to account.

And what's - what we have seen play out with the newspapers that Alden has bought is fairly similar, right? You have seen newspapers dramatically shrink their coverage of local government, of education, schools. In the case of the Chicago Tribune, which Alden bought earlier this year, they very quickly lost a quarter of their newsroom, which made it more difficult to cover, for example, the resignation of a powerful state lawmaker amid bribery charges.

They didn't have a reporter at the statehouse to cover that story. And so, when you put all these things together, you basically end up with a situation where cities across the country have one less check on the people in power, and one less binding agent for the community, which is the role that these newspapers often serve.

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Many people assume that local newspapers are dying because they haven't been able to create a sustainable business model for the digital age, now that Facebook and Google command the advertising space. But that's only part of the story. For The Atlantic's November 2021 cover story, "The Men Who Are Killing America's Newspapers," staff writer McKay Coppins reports on the secretive hedge fund Alden Global Capital and its co-founders, Randall D. Smith and Heath Freeman, who have spent years gutting newsrooms and damaging democracy. "The Men Who Are Killing America's Newspapers" is published today at The Atlantic, and is the cover story of The Atlantic's November 2021 issue.

McKay Coppins traces Alden Global Capital's rise, reporting new details on the two men who first began acquiring newspapers at the tail end of the Great Recession, and now control more than 200, including some of the country's most influential: the Chicago Tribune,   The Baltimore Sun, and the New York Daily News. Despite their influence, remarkably little is known about the septuagenarian recluse Randall D. Smith and his 41-year-old protégé Heath Freeman. Former Alden Global Capital employees tell McKay Coppins that the pair's partnership seems to transcend business, with one calling it "a father-figure relationship." Even as Alden Global Capital's portfolio grew over the years, Freeman rarely visited his newspapers. When he did, he displayed a casual contempt for journalists who worked at them. According to people who spoke with Coppins, on more than one occasion, Freeman asked aloud, "What do all these people do?"

According to industry experts McKay Coppins interviewed for the story, Alden Global Capital's strategy for newspaper ownership is simple: gut the staff, sell the real estate, and jack up subscription prices while turning out a steadily worse product, indifferent to the subscribers it's alienating in order to wring out as much cash as possible. One ex-publisher told Coppins that Freeman believed local newspapers should be treated like any other commodity in an extractive business. "To him, it's the same as oil," the ex-publisher said of Freeman. "Heath hopes the well never runs dry, but he's going to keep pumping until it does. And everyone knows it's going to run dry."

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• Follow-on article (Readers responses): [theAtlantic.com, 2021-12-21] The Story of Alden Global Capital Illustrates Deep American Problems.

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