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:
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?
Steve Ross
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.
Nellie Fly
Sam Zelle is the catalyst to the Tribs awful decline. Sniff.