Alden Global Capital is wasting no time in taking a chainsaw to its newly acquired newspapers. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik tweeted a thread that contains some horrifying details about what the hedge fund has in store for Tribune Publishing:
$60MM of that debt carries a 13% rate – it was borrowed from Media News – Alden Global's other newspaper division.
h/t to @benyt for initial tweet about NYDNews & memo
— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) May 26, 2021
How about that? A $60 million loan with a 13% interest rate that Alden will pay to itself.
The cuts, by the way, will come on top of massive downsizing that took place in 2020, when Alden was a mere minority shareholder. Tribune’s Chicago Tribune reports:
Last year, Tribune Publishing employment fell by 30%, dropping from 4,114 employees at the end of 2019 to 2,865 employees at the end of 2020, according to the company’s annual reports. The company had a total of 896 newsroom employees across its eight markets entering this year.
Finally, the New York Post’s Keith Kelly writes that Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who was in a better position than anyone to stop the sale of Tribune to Alden, is “taking a lot of heat” for not voting against it — or at least for not abstaining in a way that would have stopped the deal.
Kelly quotes an unnamed source who calls Soon-Shiong “second most despised man in newspapers today behind Heath Freeman,” Alden’s president. Nice quote. I wonder who said it?
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Where do Sheldon Adelstein and Rupert Murdoch fall in the despisement rankings? And Singleton, one of the first to race toward the bottom? Asking for a friend.
Sam Zelle is the catalyst to the Tribs awful decline. Sniff.