Do you give a damn about communities and their local papers?
That is the subject of an email sent to the “publisher” of our local and regional newspapers just now. To econdra@21st-centurymedia.com
Here’s the email:
To whom it may concern:
From Main Line Media News to the Daily Local and beyond we have to ask if you give a damn about our communities and local newspapers?
Most news is not covered because you don’t provide resources as in financial to actually hire reporters, keep them, etc.
Hedge funds shouldn’t own our media outlets, yet they do.
Are you just driving our papers into the ground for good or is it just convenient to keep them on life support to show a loss on some hedge fund’s balance sheet?
Why were all of these local papers purchased and assembled under MNG Enterprises, Digital First Media or Media News Group or whatever you’re calling yourselves under Alden Global Capital if you didn’t intend to have any newspapers survive?
I have never thought that this was a business, decision, or merely a predatory profit seeking enterprise, or even good old fashioned corporate raiders. I have always felt that this was personal, like a newspaper wronged this hedge fund someone once upon a time, and is that closer to the truth?
I have always wondered what the real impetus was for all of this and why someone would want to destroy so many local and regional newspapers?
I get the face of journalism has changed, but the need for it in local communities has increased. You are doing harm to local communities all over Southeastern PA and beyond. And to the future of journalism.
The editor you have serving our local papers doesn’t seem to get what is important to our communities or what areas the papers actually serve. Maybe they are overwhelmed or just burnt out? After all, you have local papers which once had multiple reporters and editors and associate editors and now papers often have one maybe two reporters and no more newsrooms really.If you’re going to continue to own newspapers, why not try to run them the right way?
Thanks for your time.
This is the literally only person I could get an email address for having to do with our newspapers above the local editor. That one in Norristown or something. She has no power, she’s just a worker bee. It’s very odd to have an utterly unapproachable local editor, truthfully.
Of course one the ones I would really like to email is William Dean Singleton:
Also it would be nice to talk to Alden Global Capital the hedge fund that owns them all:
Alden Global Capital is a hedge fund based in Manhattan, New York City. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith.[2] Its managing director is Heath Freeman.[2][3] By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers.[4][5] 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.[6][7][8][9]
The company operates its media holdings through Digital First Media(DFM), which it acquired in 2010 after DMG’s parent company, MediaNews Group, declared bankruptcy.[10] With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late May 2021, Alden is collectively the second-largest owner of newspapers in the United States, as calculated by average daily print circulation, second only to Gannett.[11]
In November 2021, Alden Global Capital made an offer to purchase Lee Enterprises for $24 a share in cash, or about $141 million.[12] Lee owns daily newspapers in 77 markets in 26 states, and about 350 weekly and specialty publications.[13]
Alden has a reputation for sharply cutting costs by reducing the number of journalists working on its newspapers.[16][17] In March 2018, Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist for The Washington Post, called Alden “one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism”[18] and Vanity Fairdubbed Alden the “grim reaper of American newspapers.”[19]
These people have eviscerated our local papers. They have removed our local and regional news voices. They have removed our voices by association.
So probably sending this email will do absolutely no good. But maybe if lots of people sent emails it would do some good? Or at least attract other media, who might write about these vultures, eviscerating and disemboweling and swallowing whole our local and regional newspapers, and even some bigger ones.
These people are destroying the future of journalism. And as much as people want to complain about their local papers, we need them. So Alden, this post is for you.
What started me down this twisted path this morning was opening my email and opening up the email from our local paper, The Daily Local News to see what the local headlines were. And the headline had nothing to do with Chester County news this morning. It was basically a glorified press release of a tobacco based business opening in West Reading, which is in Berks County.
I will state for the record I have nothing against this business and Berks County I wish them luck, but I live in Chester County and when I opened my email that’s supposed to hold local news headlines it was a glorified press release from a business in Berks County somebody had turned into an article and the reason it was turned into an article is because there are so few reporters left for any of these local papers and they are supposed to just churn things out. Yes churn.
In 2011, Journal Register Company was bought by Alden Global Capital after coming out of bankruptcy. Alden is a hedge fund that specializes in distressed debt assets. The journal register was based in Yardley and owned lots of newspapers, including in our area like the Daily Local, Main Line Media News, Morning Call, Delco Times, etc.
See snippet from 2021 when they bought Morning Call up in Allentown, which was another terrific paper:
Of course, after a little research, I realized that Alden Capital doesn’t own just a lot of our local newspapers. They are also into mobile home parks according to the Columbia Journalism Review:
Well, here we are. Psychologically there has to be something that can be said about a hedge fund that seems to deal in human discomfort, correct? Depriving us of the news and depriving some people of the only affordable housing they’ve ever been able to find and aren’t they just princes among men, these hedge fund guys at Alden?
They are creating a modern feudal society.
Back here in Chester County our local paper has been eviscerated and disemboweled by Alden. The same thing has happened in surrounding counties. When the last editor of The Daily Local retired, I figured it would only get worse and it has. It’s a woman who I think was from the Times Herald which is Montgomery County and Norristown.
A woman is more than capable of being an editor of a newspaper, but my point is now the editor for our local paper is pretty far removed from us even regionally. And who knows how many newspapers she is now responsible for? She just trying to make a living, but she doesn’t know our area, and to the hedge fund overlords that doesn’t matter anyway where we are. It never has.
All I know is our local newspaper, which used to have a bustling newsroom has two reporters. And they can’t even actually cover a lot of the news which occurs part of that is because they are only two people, and the other part of it is, I think they are seriously micro managed from doing their jobs. As in most of the real news is soft-pedaled, if it makes it to the paper at all, and that’s an ownership top-down decision. This, of course makes me wonder what kind of insurance these newspapers now carry under vulture, hedge fund ownership?
I used to be familiar with quite a few of these newsrooms. And the reason was I knew a lot of people that worked for these papers, including the editors, and some of the editors of these local papers were writing mentors, like the late Tom Murray, whom I still miss. I met Tom when he came in to run Main Line Life/Main Line Media News. His last paper before his death was for a short time, The Daily Local News.
The sale includes four local daily papers and several weekly and periodic publications. Author: WNEP Web Staff Published: 12:36 PM EDT August 31, 2023 Updated: 1:47 PM EDT August 31, 2023
We have watched all of our beloved local newspapers in this region shrivel up and all but blow away. There used to be three local newspapers on the Main Line alone. they have gotten shriveled up into one which is also combined with a King of Prussia newspaper. It was originally the Suburban and Wayne Times and Main Line Times. Then came a 3rd paper, Main Line Life. Now that is one big homogenized ball of goo, and mostly press releases, passing as articles. I think there’s like one reporter now.
Now called the Main Line Times and Suburban, one of its lead local news stories was also the tarted up press release passing us a story out of West Reading. Somehow, I also don’t see the connection between Lower Merion and Radnor Township and Berks County.
I used to subscribe to both Main Line Media News and Daily Local. When I moved to Chester County, I let my subscription go for Main Line Media News and I used to read the paper online. The Daily Local like The Delco Times always seemed to have some sort of a pay wall – not at first, but that’s what it evolved into. So I wanted to support my local newspaper living in Chester County, which made me get a digital only subscriber to The Daily Local.
I had my Daily Local subscription for a few years. And then sometime around Covid, I had a bank card kited and I had to update 1 million things, including my newspaper subscription. I went into my Daily Local account and tried to update my information. It let me into my account, but it would not let me save my updated information and there was no one to call any longer because the hedge fund owners had also eviscerated like the local billing and subscription department. So I let my subscription lapse.
Since I let my subscription lapse, I just try to read the local articles I can catch on different browsers or an internet cache.
But fairly recently again, I’ve been getting solicitation calls. I have screen captured the number that called me twice recently within a couple of hours:
I remembered such calls a while back, and my spam call blocker knocked them off. But then I decided today that they were probably calling about the Daily Local so I called them back.
The first call was an obnoxious offshore woman on the phone who said she was from Minnesota. She didn’t like that I wasn’t giving her the information she needed so she could try to sell me my local newspaper, so eventually she grew frustrated and hung up. But since they had called me twice on August 21, I decided to call back a second time.
Miraculously, this phone call landed me in a call center actually contained within the boundaries of the United States of America. I had a very pleasant and normal woman to speak with and from her I learned that although this hedge fund can’t seem to pay to have more reporters covering local news, they apparently CAN pay for professional solicitation firms to solicit for them to get new subscribers or to gain back old subscribers. And sometimes I think maybe they do debt collection too but I’m not sure.
If you’ve ever looked at a nonprofit form 990 and checked out the expenses, when nonprofits employ “professional” or paid solicitation firms, you will see how expensive it is to actually have these people doing your business for you. I find it astounding that we no longer have newspapers with actual newsrooms let alone reporters and staff to run them, but they pay for this?
Alden Capital is killing our newspapers. Why are they killing our news sources really? I mean, I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I just don’t understand why these particular vultures started in on journalism?
Bear Stearns was an investment bank in NYC that kind of specialized in sleazy and Ace Greenberg’s paper clip memos. Once upon a time decades ago, I actually met Ace and his vice chairman. At that time I had been hired as an admin on one of the Bear Stearns trading desks. I was commuting from Philadelphia, like surprisingly many people do commute to New York from Philadelphia. I used to talk to these two little older guys on the elevator every morning and it ended up one was Ace, and the other was his vice chairman. Now I really liked talking to both of them. They were interesting, and I met some people at Bear Stearns who were wonderful, but overall the place was sleazy and if you wonder where they get the inspiration for investment bankers like you saw in the Wall Street movies or even the TV show Billions, look no further. Art does often imitate life.
I will note we all used to get these memos. They were distributed to everyone, and eventually ended up in a book called Memos From the Chairman. I actually used to own a copy. I actually used to have some of the original memos, but they got lost on a move. I lasted a little over a year at Bear Stearns. If you could last year at Bear Stearns, you could work anywhere. I was fascinated by how Bear Stearns worked, but seriously hated that job. The hours sucked, the majority of people were miserable, they had a wonderful cafeteria, because you could never leave for lunch, and mice would run over your feet on the trading room floors.
OK sorry I got off on a total tangent there. It was just a weird little trip down memory lane when I realized the guy that owns the hedge fun that is eviscerating all our local newspapers across the country came from Bear Stearns and all of a sudden that was like an epiphany or an Aha moment and it now makes perfect sense.
However, hedge funds and investment bankers shouldn’t be running our newspapers. They are only ever interested in news that makes them look good, so I guess it makes sense that they’re collecting them and destroying them since often newspapers and media don’t make hedge fun owners, and investment bankers look good.
And since investment bankers and hedge fund owners prop up political candidates and politicians on all sorts of stages, you can’t expect politicians to want to actually save our newspapers can you?
I hate to sound like a giant conspiracy theorist, but this is actually I think I conspiracy theory that has legs.
Is this all actually a ploy to get rid of the fourth estate?
The term “Fourth Estate” refers to the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues, correct? So if hedge fund owners own newspapers and probably a bunch of politicians too after a donation kind of fashion, doesn’t this make perfect sense?
Maybe if we had more meaningful campaign finance reform, we’d also save more of our newspapers?
Well, that’s as far as this ramble is going for today. I would honestly love to be able to support local newspapers, but at this point if you do, it’s a catch 22 because you’re also supporting corporate raiders and investment bankers by lining their pockets because it’s not like they’re actually putting money into the newspapers is it?
Clark Kent and Lois Lane have left the building. At least definitely in West Chester, because why are the newspaper building once stood are ugly condos.
As long as hedge funds own local newspapers, the future of journalism is grim.
