Journalists sounded the alarm Wednesday after Tribune Publishing’s largest shareholder sold his stake in the company to a hedge fund that’s been described as “a destroyer of newspapers.”
In a joint statement, the newspaper unions of Tribune Publishing—representing workers at papers including the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun—said that the news of Alden Global Capital purchasing Michael Ferro’s 25.2% stake in the company should not be seen as “simply another change in stock ownership” because “Alden is not a company that invests in newspapers so they succeed.”
“They buy into newspaper businesses with the express purpose of harvesting out huge profits—well above industry standards—and slashing staff and burning resources,” the statement read.
“We know we are faced with the very real threat that Alden is looking to bleed its next chain of newspapers dry,” it continued.
In a 2018 column, Bloomberg‘s Joe Nocera wrote that Alden was a “notorious as a destroyer of newspapers,” and that, under the direction of President Heath Freeman, the company carries out “layoffs [that] aren’t just painful. They are savage.”
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Chicago Tribune Guild member Gregory Pratt commented on Alden’s history of slashing newsrooms, writing in a tweet that “Even in an industry flooded with bad owners, this is awful news. Alden gutted the Denver Post, among many other papers.”
Former Tribune reporter Mark Caro wrote in a tweet that “The Tribune parent company keeps going from one piece-of-garbage owner to another.”
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