Alden Global Capital owns newspapers across the United States, from the Denver Post to the Chicago Tribune. The industry fears it for cutting staff and selling off real estate, and a federal inquiry found it had probably moved pension money into its own funds.
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Alden is a hedge fund, not a publisher. It built its stake in the American press over more than a decade, starting with a stake in MediaNews Group. Its distressed-opportunities fund, launched in 2008, was worth nearly $3 billion by 2011. By 2021 it held stakes in about 200 US newspapers, and hedge funds or private equity firms together owned half of the country’s daily titles.
What Alden did once it owned a paper
At the Denver Post, Alden’s pattern became public in the starkest way. Senior leadership said the sale would be the paper’s best chance at a long-term future. Eight years later, the newsroom was in open revolt against its own owners.
The pattern was not unique to Denver. By 2021, Alden’s MediaNews Group held stakes in roughly two hundred titles, among them the Boston Herald, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Trentonian, the Saratogian, and papers serving St Paul and Orange County. The US Department of Labor investigated Alden and found it had “probably” violated federal pension protections by moving $294 million of newspaper employees’ retirement savings into its own funds, the Washington Post reported.
Megan Greenwell, whose book on private equity’s effect on American industries includes a chapter on the press, put the mechanism plainly: private equity firms did not create the newspaper industry’s financial problems, but they used the shrinking market to their own advantage. There was “still some juice to be wrung” from struggling papers, she said, and the firms took it before moving on.
The scale of the losses
Between 2004 and 2019, the period when Alden bought dozens of papers and GateHouse Media merged with Gannett to form the country’s largest newspaper owner, half of all US newspaper jobs disappeared and a quarter of all papers closed, according to Greenwell’s research. A fifth of the papers that survived that period had become what she calls “ghost papers”: titles that run no staff-written journalism and carry only syndicated copy.
The Guardian’s tally, drawn from industry analysis, put the wider toll at 2,100 local papers closed in the US since 2005, one in four of the total, with more than 70 newsrooms shutting in the 15 months before June 2021 alone.
Why owners sold to firms like Alden in the first place
Family owners often had little real choice. A board’s fiduciary duty pushes a sale toward the highest bidder, even when that bidder’s plans are not in the paper’s long-term interest, Greenwell said. Many owners were also looking for an exit. Local papers had made margins of 20 to 30% for decades, yet owners who saw profits falling wanted out. Hedge funds also arrived as lenders of last resort when conventional banks would not lend.
Alden’s chief executive, Heath Freeman, has described the acquisitions differently. After shareholders approved the $630 million purchase of Tribune Publishing in 2021, he said the deal reaffirmed the firm’s “commitment to the newspaper industry,” with a focus on helping papers reach sustainable, long-term operation.
What the consolidation looked like industry-wide
Alden was not the only firm buying. Fortress Investment Group paid $1.4 billion for Gannett through GateHouse Media, which made the merged firm the country’s biggest newspaper owner by title count and circulation. Out of bankruptcy in 2020, Chatham Asset Management bought McClatchy, the publisher of the Miami Herald and the Sacramento Bee. Of the chains that led the industry in 2011, most have since been absorbed by Alden, Gannett, Lee, or Chatham.
Kyle Pope, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, argued the consolidation undercuts the case that local papers deserve community support. The new owners show “no sense of civic obligation,” he said, and have cut news coverage rather than build it up.
Readers still trust what remains of local coverage more than national outlets. A 2019 Knight-Gallup study found that six in ten saw local news organisations as more caring, trustworthy, or unbiased than national ones.
