Alden buys four papers in Pennsylvania. You’ll have no trouble believing what happened next.

The historic Scranton Times building. Photo (cc) 2022 by Jeffrey Hayes.

Last summer came horrifying news from Scranton, Pennsylvania: the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital was buying the Scranton Times-Tribune and three sister papers from the Lynett family, the local publishers going back to 1895. The sale was taking place even though those members of the family who actually ran the papers opposed it. They were outvoted by other members of the family who simply wanted to cash out and get on with their lives. Ellen Clegg and I talked about it at the time on the “What Works” podcast.

What happened next was predictable and depressing. Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple traveled to the Scranton area recently and filed a long, sad report about what he found (free link). The lowlights:

• The news staff, already down to 40, a steep decline from 90 in the late 1990s, was immediately cut by another 10, with employees offered voluntary buyouts if they would just go away.
• Newsrooms in Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton and Pottsfield were put up for sale. The Scranton Times’ headquarters was abandoned in late November, with journalists being told that most of them would be expected to work at home.
• Some customer service calls were outsourced to the Philippines.

Almost immediately, Wemple writes, editorials about local and state issues were replaced with generic national content, which is exactly the opposite approach that researchers Joshua Darr, Matthew Hitt and Johanna Dunaway found is helpful in reducing political polarization. As Darr told Ellen in 2021:

It’s important for people to be able to express their opinions on national politics, and there are myriad ways to do that. But I don’t think there’s necessarily a good reason for local newspapers to devote some of their precious op-ed page space to things that aren’t local. I think they should be maximizing their comparative advantage in the marketplace by giving people things that they can’t get anywhere else.

There’s no question that the Pennsylvania papers were facing real challenges. As Wemple reports, paid circulation and advertising were both in a tailspin, and the Lynett family understandably was tired of subsidizing losses. But it didn’t have to end like this. Perhaps the best solution would have been for a local nonprofit institution to purchase the papers, as is the case at another Pennsylvania paper — The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit entity owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute.

Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, has proposed tax incentives and other measures to prevent newspapers from falling into the hands of cost-slashing chains. Unfortunately, such steps would not have come in time to save the Lynett papers.

Sadly, based on Wemple’s story, it doesn’t sound like much of an effort was made to find a buyer that would have operated the papers for the benefit of the public rather than for Alden’s wealthy investors. I just hope that some of the journalists who have lost their jobs will fight back by starting their own venture, as is happening in community after community across the country.

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