Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund responsible for hollowing out newspapers from coast to coast and at all points in between, is trying to have the last laugh at rival Hearst’s expense.
Earlier this week it was reported that The Dallas Morning News would lay off 26 employees, eliminating the entire copy desk and outsourcing print page production. Rachel Behrndt of WFAA-TV wrote that the paper’s union said the move violated the collective bargaining agreement.
But Behrndt also noted that the Morning News was adding 18 new positions.
The Hearst chain acquired the Morning News in September after a several-months-long bidding war with Alden that resulted in Hearst’s paying a higher price than it had originally offered — but less than Alden was prepared to pay.
Following the layoffs, Alden’s MediaNews Group, one of two newspaper chains that it owns, issued a statement saying that it was “unfortunate that Hearst duped Dallas Morning News controlling shareholder Robert Decherd into handing over control of this storied newspaper, his legacy now tarnished forever,” according to Bron Maher of A Media Operator.
“MediaNews Group was obviously the superior operator bidding to buy the newspaper,” the statement continued. “These newsroom cuts should be a stark warning to anyone who considers selling to Hearst and, even worse, at a massive discount.”
Current and former staff members at papers such as the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and the Boston Herald, all of which have been hollowed out under Alden’s ownership, might differ with that assertion.
Not to get all dewy-eyed about Hearst, a corporate chain with multiple media holdings, including 28 daily newspapers. But those papers are generally held in high regard. The Hearst approach is to form groups of newspapers within a state and to focus on statewide and regional coverage. Thus the chain has rolled up most of Texas’ papers, including the Houston Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman and the San Antonio Express-News — and now The Dallas Morning News.
Nor should the layoffs have come as a surprise. The Morning News’ public editor, Stephen Buckley, wrote more than a month ago:
We will be removing positions that are duplicated as a result of the merger, and those employees will be leaving the company over the next six months. In many cases, we will reinvest those dollars in positions we need to take advantage of the new digital capabilities.
Indeed, the whole point to forming regional groups is to eliminate redundancies, which leads to layoffs but also to the opportunity to add new positions, as Hearst is doing in Dallas.
There is no substitute for committed local ownership, and it’s a shame that the previous owners of the Morning News decided to sell. In both the short and the long term, though, its staff and its readers are far better off with Hearst than they would have been with Alden Global Capital.
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
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