Alden Proposes Purchase of Tribune Publishing

Hedge fund Alden Global offers to buy Tribune Publishing

 

A Tribune paper reports on Alden's offer:
New York hedge fund Alden looks to buy The Morning Call’s parent company

 

Note reference to LA Times losing $50m/year.
https://nypost.com/2021/01/05/hedge-funds-bid-to-buy-rest-of-tribune-publishing-met-with-resistance/

 

I understand the economic challenges newspapers face. But I grew up in Denver and have seen Alden gut a paper of my youth, the Denver Post. And then I left Colorado for grad school in Indiana and I remember buying the Tribune on my way to class every day. The thought of Alden gutting the Chicago Tribune makes be very, very sad.

 

Me, too. Read it every day from my early teens to age 25, when I left the Midwest. "Dewey Defeats Truman" notwithstanding, that paper did a lot of great work over the years, especially from the mid-1970s until the industry decline began. Both the Trib and Sun-Times were great reads in the late '70s and early '80s when both were at the top of their game.

 

Anybody know if the hedge funds that have pillaged newspapers will be hurt by the happenings on Wall Street? Don't even know the names of them all. Does this hurt them at all? Will it affect speed of layoffs, end of the print product, etc?

 

The end of the print product can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned.

 

I know that would result in saving money, but wouldn't the losses in advertising revenue exceed the savings?

 

For now, yes, absolutely. Print is still profitable. It will probably stay profitable for another year or two.

I just mean from a journalism perspective, it's tough to build a web product that generates significant revenue when writers are wasting their precious time writing stories "to fill the paper." That's still a pervasive problem even at papers that are "digital first." Until it's "digital only," the web product won't be good enough to sell enough subscriptions to keep the business afloat.

 

Hmmm...maybe. I've been on both sides: A newspaper with a web site, where "filling the paper" was absolutely a priority (albeit a declining one) and a website with a newspaper, where we hardly ever talked about the print edition and acted as if it didn't exist.

The digital-only site still shoveled a lot of crap and was not probably something I would pay for. I mean, it's nice to say you're going to focus on high-quality stuff to sell subscriptions, but the entire digital-only infrastructure was set up around getting stuff up on the web fast, with little or no editing. When the nightly lottery results are drawing 1,000 times the traffic of something that took you three days to report and write, the incentives can get skewed.

In that sense, I think there's going to be a difficult transition for media outlets going from a click-heavy emphasis to subscription emphasis, just as there was going from print to digital.

 

I think, unfortunately, you are right.

 

The key question is how many people will pay for those high-quality, in-depth online articles behind the paywall, when there are still plenty of other ways to get free information.

Case in point: I was wondering where travel restrictions to Hawaii stand as COVID vaccinations begin to (finally) become more common on the islands. So I Googled "Hawaii travel restrictions" and hit the news tab.

The Washington Post had what looked like an in-depth story on the issue from one day ago, but it was behind the paywall. So I clicked on the Honolulu paper's story link and read it for free. There also were updates available from the Hawaii governor's office and other Hawaii travel/tourism websites. Several ways to get the information I needed, without paying a cent.