Alden Global Capital on Friday purchased Tribune Publishing, which owns the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News, for an estimated $633 million, the Tribune reported Saturday.
The deal is expected to close on Tuesday, making Alden the second largest newspaper owner in the country behind Gannett.
Besides the Tribune and Daily News, Tribune Publishing also owns the Hartford Courant, Orlando Sentinel, The Baltimore Sun, South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel, The Morning Call in Pennsylvania, The Daily Press and The Virginian Pilot in Virginia, according to the company’s website.
Once completed, Tribune, which is publicly traded, will go private and shareholders will cash out at around $17 per share, according to the meeting notice and proxy vote document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
According to a story with Daily News rival New York Post, Alden already owned a third of the company and will use its Digital First subsidiary, which owns the Boston Herald, Denver Post and San Mercury News, to take control of the new assets.
Tribune employees have been continually active in trying to get a different buyer for the chain given Alden’s profit-driven slashing of jobs in its newsrooms across the country.
Alden became Tribune’s largest shareholder in 2019, followed by Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. He abstained from Friday’s sale vote.
The NewsGuild journalist’s union is hoping Shiong’s abstention could nullify the deal because the proxy vote rules state that one-third of non-Alden shareholders must approve the sale.
It will depend on whether Shiong’s abstention counts for or against the sale, union President Jon Schleuss told the Post.
“We’re digging into this question right now,” he said.
The Alden deal is just the latest major acquisition of a newspaper company by an investment firm dedicated to maximizing profits in distressed industries. The collapse of print advertising as readers migrated to digital publications has rocked the traditional newspaper business. Publishers have shut down more than 2,000 papers over the past 15 years and half of newsroom jobs have disappeared.
A recent study of the industry published by the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina found that "successive technological and economic assaults have destroyed the for-profit business model that sustained local journalism in this country for two centuries.
“In the 15 years leading up to 2020, more than one-fourth of the country’s newspapers disappeared, leaving residents in thousands of communities – inner-city neighborhoods, suburban towns and rural villages – living in vast news deserts," the report said.
The report echoes the concerns of the Tribune employees regarding the Alden takeover.
“Despite the shrinking universe of surviving papers, the chains are bigger than ever – and, poised to grow even bigger, with the creation of a handful of highly leveraged mega-chains formed by the union of large publicly traded newspaper companies with large hedge funds and private equity firms,” the report said.
“Massive consolidation in the newspaper industry has shifted editorial and business decisions to a few large corporations without strong ties to the communities where their papers are located. As profitability has superseded journalism’s civic mission on many newspapers, trust in local media has declined.”
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