Tag: Tribune Publishing

Poynter’s deep dive into Baltimore’s setting Sun and the rise of the Banner; plus, media notes

Perhaps no city has benefited from a forceful response to the depredations of Alden Global Capital more than Baltimore. In 2021, the slash-and-burn hedge fund purchased Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers, including such storied titles as the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant.

And The Baltimore Sun.

Now Angela Fu of Poynter Online has written a deep dive into the Baltimore media scene on what happened after Alden’s subsequent sale of the Sun a year ago to David Smith, the head of Sinclair Broadcast Group, infamous for imposing his right-wing views on newscasts at the company’s national empire of television stations (in New England, Sinclair has stations in Portland and Providence).

The other principal subject of Fu’s article is The Baltimore Banner, a digital nonprofit begun in 2022 by wealthy hotelier Stewart Bainum after his efforts to purchase the Sun — and then the entire Tribune chain — were spurned by Tribune’s board. Unlike most nonprofits, even some of the larger ones that Ellen Clegg and I included in our book, “What Works in Community News,” the Banner is what you might call a full-service news project, with a newsroom staff of about 80. (The Sun now employs just 56.) The Banner offers breaking news, sports, arts and culture in addition to the accountability journalism that is the hallmark of such projects. Fu writes:

While the Sun battles staff attrition, the Banner continues to grow. Since June, it has launched an “Education Hub” and expanded business coverage. The Banner is also working to extend its footprint across the state, hiring a number of regional reporters to cover counties that lack local news sources and starting region-specific newsletters. Ongoing experiments include live blogs, vertical video on the site’s homepage and comment sections on certain stories for subscribers.

Fu’s reporting is detailed and even-handed. At the Sun, she reports that there has been a wave of departures since the Smith takeover and widespread angst over his forcing the paper to run second-rate stories from the Baltimore television station that he owns. Smith has also ordered up critical reporting on the city council while funding a campaign to shrink the size of the council from 14 members to eight.

But though the Banner has been widely praised for its all-in approach to filling the gap created by the Sun’s decline, Fu writes that it has also come under criticism for taking an outmoded approach to reporting on law enforcement and for covering the city’s opioid crisis (in partnership with The New York Times) in a way that failed to acknowledge the work of grassroots organizations.

Also of note: The Banner’s board of directors includes Brian McGrory, chair of Boston University’s journalism program and a former editor of The Boston Globe. The city is also served by the Baltimore Beat, a nonprofit that covers the Black community.

What I found kind of odd about Fu’s story was the framing. She found that the Sun under Alden did not turn into the fiasco many had predicted, and that the real newsroom exodus didn’t begin until after Smith acquired it. She begins by describing the competition between the Banner and the Sun in covering the catastrophic accident that took out the Francis Scott Key Bridge last March, competition that she says was good for the city, and she wonders whether that brief moment is closing as Smith imposes his will.

Fu’s done the work, so I’m not disagreeing with any of this. Nor do I disagree with her observation that Alden may have held back on budget cuts at the Sun because it didn’t want to fall behind the Banner. But did anyone think it was going to last? In fact, it took Alden less than three years after it bought the Sun to turn around and sell it to a terrible owner who is transforming the paper into something of a right-wing laughingstock. Does it really matter if Alden destroyed the Sun by cutting it or by letting David Smith ruin it? Pick your poison.

The reality is that Baltimore is incredibly lucky to have one news source of record, and that source is now The Baltimore Banner. Bainum tells Fu that the Banner is eventually going to have to break even and survive on its own. Let’s hope the community gives it the support that it needs.

Media notes

• Muzzle follow-up. Last July, I gave a New England Muzzle Award to Waltham Community Access Corp., which claimed a rival had violated its copyright by grabbing clips of government meetings, even though WCAC receives guaranteed funding from licensing fees mandated by state law. That rival, a citizens journalism group known as Channel 781, sued, claiming that WCAC had acted in bad faith. Now a federal judge, Patti Saris, has refused to dismiss the suit and has instead asked the two sides to work out a settlement, Aubrey Hawkes reports in The Waltham Times.

• Going hybrid in New Hampshire. The Keene Sentinel of New Hampshire, one of New England’s feistier independent daily newspapers, is emulating many of its for-profit peers by starting a nonprofit arm that will accept donations to pay for certain types of public interest reporting. According to an announcement, the Local Journalism Fund aims to raise $75,000 in 2025, and will kick it off with a public event on Jan. 21 featuring two journalists from the Uvalde News Leader in Texas, which covered a horrific mass shooting at a local elementary school in 2022.

• The blizzard of Ozy. I never thought anyone could make me care about the decline and fall Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson and his associates. I have to say that I wasn’t even sure what it was, though I have since learned that it published meme-friendly news (and some serious stuff) in the same digital space as BuzzFeed, Mic  and Upworthy. At my friend Emily Rooney’s urging, though, I listened to a three-part podcast on Watson’s rise, fall and his criminal trial hosted by the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s little more than a conversation between host Josh Hersh and my former “Beat the Press colleague Susie Banikarim, who covered the trial. That doesn’t sound too exciting, but — as Emily promised — it’s smart and riveting. Highly recommended.

Uri Berliner’s disingenuous critique of NPR was the most-viewed Media Nation post of 2024

Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.

On this last day of 2024, I’m taking a look back before we plunge ahead into the new year. Media Nation’s 10 most viewed posts for the year range from my takedown of an intellectually dishonest critique of NPR, to CBS News’ reprimand of an on-air host for being too confrontational with a guest, to news that The Boston Globe is seeking to acquire Boston magazine. So let’s get right to it.

1. Fish in a barrel: Berliner’s case against NPR is based on false and out-of-context facts (April 11). Uri Berliner, a top editor at NPR, created a stir when he accused his employer of liberal bias in a long essay for The Free Press. The problem was that his examples didn’t hold up to scrutiny. To name just one: Berliner wrote that NPR failed to confess its sins after special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia, which isn’t even remotely what Mueller reported. There was a lot more disingenuousness where that came from. Berliner ended up resigning his post at NPR and going to work for — yes, The Free Press.

2. Less news, more happy talk: Why CBS News’ reprimand of Tony Dokoupil is so ridiculous (Oct. 8). Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates popped up on the CBS morning newscast to promote latest book, “The Message,” and faced an unexpectedly tough grilling over his anti-Israeli views from co-host Tony Dokoupil. Among other things, Dokoupil told Coates that his book woudn’t be out of place “in the backpack of an extremist.” Coates gave as good as he got, and he probably sold a few more books than he otherwise would have. Nevertheless, CBS News management called Dokoupil on the carpet — probably because his attempt to commit journalism contradicted the light banter that defines the morning-news format.

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3. A riveting Boston Globe story about a medical disaster with ties to the local news crisis (Jan. 29). A Globe report about the death of a new mother at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital had something in common with the same forces that have hollowed out much of the local-news business. The mother’s death may have been caused by the hospital’s lacking a basic piece of equipment that had been repossessed because its corporate owner, Steward Health Care, wasn’t paying its bills. Steward, in turn, had been pillaged by a private-equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which is the same outfit that helped the notorious newsroom-gutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital acquire Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers in 2021.

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If the LA Times’ owner had stepped up, the LA Local News Initiative might not be needed

Los Angeles with Mount Baldy in the background. Photo (cc) 2019 by Alek Leckszas.

The American Journalism Project announced this week that it’s raising $15 million to cover underserved communities in Los Angeles. The news was broken Tuesday by Axios media reporter Sara Fischer.

What’s been left unsaid (although Rick Edmonds of Poynter observes that it’s being hinted at) is that this is being driven by the abject failure of the Los Angeles Times’ celebrity billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, to step up and provide the region with the journalism that it needs. Indeed, among the board members of the new Los Angeles Local News Initiative is Kevin Merida, who quit as executive editor of the Times amid budget cuts and reports that Soon-Shiong was interfering with Merida’s editorial judgment.

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For a metropolitan area the size of LA, $15 million is a drop in the bucket, though presumably it’s meant as a down payment on what will be a larger effort. The money will be spread among a variety of existing projects and could fund new outlets as well. Monica Lozano, who chairs the initiative’s board, told Fischer: “We believe no one news entity can fill all of the information needs of communities as large, complex and diverse as Los Angeles. We needed to think about a model that would match that complexity and that diversity.”

Here’s how the American Journalism Project describes the initiative in its announcement:

The L.A. Local News Initiative will launch a nonprofit organization that will operate and support local newsrooms in Los Angeles to provide coverage at neighborhood, regional, and state levels in service of L.A. communities. The initiative aims to increase the volume of coverage that enables residents to take effective action and navigate life on a local level, and that represents all L.A. communities in public discourse. It will also increase accountability journalism that keeps in check the billions of dollars in government and private spending affecting the Angelenos.

What’s sad is that the AJP should have been able to direct its attention elsewhere if Soon-Shiong hadn’t proven himself to be a feckless and irresponsible owner. An unimaginably wealthy surgeon, he and his family purchased the LA Times in 2018 for $500 million. He appeared to be exactly what the Times needed after years of chaotic ownership.

Like John and Linda Henry at The Boston Globe, Glen Taylor at The Minnesota Star Tribune and Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post (who, as we know, has run into difficulties in recent years), Soon-Shiong was seen as someone who would invest a small share of his billions into rebuilding the Times so that it could re-emerge as a profitable and growing enterprise.

Instead, Soon-Shiong showed little of the patience and judgment needed to pull it off. Worse, he used his position on the board of Tribune Publishing to allow that chain’s nine large-market daily newspapers to fall into the hands of the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital, and later sold The San Diego-Tribune (which he’d acquired as part of the LA Times deal) directly to Alden.

Meanwhile, the Times has endured cut after cut under Soon-Shiong’s stewardship, including about 115 employees, or more than 20% of the newsroom, earlier this year.

As Rick Edmonds writes of the new initiative:

While the announcement does not criticize the Los Angeles Times directly, it has numerous veiled references to what the initiative’s founders find wrong with the legacy newspaper. Its first sentence says the initiative has been undertaken in response to “drastic losses in local journalism resources.”

The shame of it is that there are only so many philanthropic dollars out there, and the money and energy being invested in Los Angeles could have been directed elsewhere — if only Soon-Shiong thought of himself as a genuine steward of journalism in Southern California.

Alden Global Capital to close eight weekly papers in Minnesota

The hedge fund Alden Global Capital, notorious for hollowing out its newspapers, is shutting down eight weekly newspapers in Minnesota. Louis Krauss of the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune reports that six of the papers are part of the Southwest News Media group and two are under the auspices of Crow River Media.

“The closings will leave the communities without their long-time local papers,” Krauss writes. “Two of the papers, the Shakopee Valley News and Chaska Herald, have been published for more than 160 years, while the Jordan Independent was founded 140 years ago.”

Alden owns 68 dailies and more than 300 weekly publications through its MediaNews Group as well as another seven larger-market dailies through Tribune Publishing. Tribune recently sold The Baltimore Sun to David Smith, the head of Sinclair Broadcasting; Smith’s first act was to meet with his staff and berate them. Alden also owns New York’s Daily News but for some reason has separated it from its Tribune holdings. In Massachusetts, Alden owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.

A number of startup projects that Ellen Clegg and I wrote about in “What Works for Community News” were founded by people who quit an Alden-owned paper rather than continue to put up with round after round of cuts. Examples include relatively large outlets like The Colorado Sun and small projects like The Mendocino Voice and Santa Cruz Local.

Now it looks like some opportunities are about to open up in Minnesota for entrepreneurial-minded journalists.

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A riveting Boston Globe story about a medical disaster with ties to the local news crisis

St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in 2012. Photo (cc) by John Phelan.

If you haven’t seen The Boston Globe’s story about a mother who died shortly after giving birth, perhaps because the hospital lacked a device it needed to stop her bleeding, then you have to stop what you’re doing and give it a read. Globe reporter Jessica Bartlett’s 2,800-word story is both riveting and incredibly disturbing. It’s also so well-crafted that I asked my intermediate reporting students to read it in class so we could talk about how it was put together.

Bartlett skillfully shifts back and forth between the frantic attempts to save Sungida Rashid’s life and the larger crisis at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the Brighton hospital that Rashid and her husband, Nabil Haque, had chosen for the birth of their first child. We learn that St. Elizabeth’s did not have the device, known as an embolism coil, because the hospital’s supply had been repossessed. It turns out that Steward Health Care, a for-profit company that owns St. Elizabeth’s and eight other hospitals in Massachusetts, hadn’t been paying its bills.

Incredibly, Haque didn’t know that devastating fact until the Globe informed him about it after he and his daughter had moved back to Bangladesh.

The major question a reader might have after reading the story was how St. Elizabeth’s and Steward had fallen into such a financial mess. That story is laid out in an earlier story by Bartlett and in a column by Globe business columnist Larry Edelman, who explain that a private equity firm known as Cerberus Capital Management had bailed out the hospitals in 2010. According to Edelman, Cerberus quadrupled its money and flipped the hospitals in 2017.

As Edelman points out, Cerberus is “named after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades in Greek mythology.” The firm is also deeply involved in the destruction of the newspaper business. In 2021, Julie Reynolds reported for Nieman Lab that Cerberus was the financial backer for the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital when it acquired Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. Cerberus gets much of its money, in turn, from investments made by public employee pension funds, especially in California and Pennsylvania.

Reynolds talked about the Alden-Cerberus connection on our “What Works” podcast back in November 2021.

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Why we should be wary of The Baltimore Sun’s return to local ownership

The Baltimore Sun’s convoluted ownership journey took an unexpected turn on Monday. The notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which acquired the paper as part of its purchase of Tribune Publishing in 2021, sold the Sun to David Smith, who’s executive chairman of the television network Sinclair. The price has not been disclosed.

Smith is a Baltimore guy, and he’s buying the Sun as an individual — that is, the Sun will not be part of Sinclair. In that respect, the deal is similar to Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post in 2013. The Post is not part of Amazon, although the mega-retailer was enlisted to sell discount descriptions to the Post, especially during the early years of Bezos’ ownership.

We are in the early hours of the Sun deal, so we don’t know how this is going to play out. It’s striking how much fear and criticism I’ve seen given Alden’s reputation as the worst newspaper owner on the planet, infamous for slashing newsrooms, selling off real estate and making journalists work out of their homes. Normally a transfer to independent ownership would be celebrated, and, in fact, Smith might provide an infusion of cash and energy. Then again, he might also bring his toxic brand of right-wing politics to the Sun.

The Sun is the flagship of a regional group that also includes the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, the site of a horrific mass shooting some years ago.

This didn’t have to happen. Back when Tribune was for sale, Baltimore hotel magnate Stewart Bainum reached an agreement to buy the Sun from Alden once Alden had acquired Tribune. Bainum, though, came to believe that Alden was not adhering to that agreement, and he wound up bidding for all of Tribune’s nine major-market newspapers.

Although Bainum was offering more money than Alden ($680 million versus $635 million), word at the time was that Alden’s bid was more straightforward, and the vulture capitalists won the prize. Among other things, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times and then a member of Tribune’s board, declined to stop the sale to Alden, for which he was roundly criticized.

Bainum, meanwhile, used some of his wealth to found The Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit digital venture that immediately established a reputation for journalistic excellence. It will be fascinating to see whether Smith rebuilds the Sun into a worthy competitor to the Banner, or if instead he uses it to grind his political axe.

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Kevin Merida’s departure from the LA Times raises doubts about its billionaire owner

Kevin Merida. Photo (cc) 2021 by Michifornia.

There’s some very bad news coming out of Los Angeles this week. Kevin Merida, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, is stepping down after just two and a half years on the job. Merida, who previously held high-level jobs at The Washington Post and ESPN, is perhaps the country’s most prominent Black editor, and his departure raises serious questions about the LA Times’ owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018.

Soon-Shiong has certainly been a better steward than a corporate chain or hedge fund would have been, but his time at the helm has been unsteady. He wants to grow toward profitability, but he keeps cutting the staff. Twice he has gone out of his way to deliver newspapers into the arms of the undertakers at Alden Global Capital, doing nothing to stop Alden’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market dailies in 2021 and then selling The San Diego Union-Tribune to Alden in 2023.

Poynter media columnist Tom Jones notes that Soon-Shiong is now trying to reassure the LA Times newsroom that Merida’s departure will not lead to a similar fate:

Perhaps sensing the uneasiness of his newsroom, Soon-Shiong wrote in a note, “Our commitment to the L.A. Times and its mission has not wavered since the inception of our acquisition. However, given the persistent challenges we face, it is now imperative that we all work together to build a sustainable business that allows for growth and innovation of the L.A. Times and L.A. Times Studios in order to achieve our vision.”

Benjamin Mullin, writing in The New York Times, reports that Merida clashed with members of Soon-Shiong’s family over Merida’s edict that staff members who signed a petition condemning Israel’s war in Gaza would be temporarily banned from covering stories related to the war. Whether or not you think Merida was clinging to outmoded ethical standards, you can’t say that move was controversial. Indeed, two New York Times contributors resigned, apparently under pressure, after signing a similar letter.

At one time it looked like wealthy individual owners might be a solution to the news crisis — not that they could be expected to underwrite losses forever, but they could certainly provide the runway needed to build a new, sustainable business model. Now, with Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post floundering, it looks like the only wealthy newspaper owners who’ve fulfilled their promise are John and Linda Henry at The Boston Globe and Glen Taylor at the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Sadly, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future of the LA Times under Soon-Shiong.

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There he goes again: Patrick Soon-Shiong delivers another paper to Alden Global Capital

Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the wealthy surgeon who owns the Los Angeles Times, has delivered yet another daily newspaper into the greedy hands of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Soon-Shiong announced Monday that he’d sell The San Diego Union-Tribune to Alden’s MediaNews Group. By my count, the Union-Tribune becomes the 10th paper that Soon-Shiong has helped turn over to Alden. As Sara Fischer and Andrew Keatts report for Axios, the new owners immediately announced cuts to the newsroom.

When Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times in 2018, the Union-Tribune was thrown in as part of the deal. Soon-Shiong was hailed by optimistic media observers as someone who, like Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post and John Henry at The Boston Globe, would provide his papers with the runway they needed to become self-sustaining enterprises.

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It’s been a mixed bag. Soon-Shiong’s main interest has been the LA Times, but he’s gone back and forth between investing and cutting. By no means has the Times been hollowed out as if it had been owned by, oh, let’s just say Alden Global Capital. But he’s run a lean ship, with the Times announcing just a few days ago that the recent sale of its press meant that game stories, box scores and standings would be eliminated from its print edition, according to Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing.

Selling off the San Diego paper to one of the worst possible buyers is reminiscent of John Henry’s decision to sell the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester to a Florida chain back in 2014. As I recount in my book “The Return of the Moguls,” folks at the T&G thought Henry had promised not to sell unless a local buyer could be found; Henry told me his only promise had been not to sell to GateHouse Media. In any case, GateHouse managed to acquire the T&G within months and immediately began hollowing it out. GateHouse later morphed into Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain with about 200 dailies, which is notorious for its cost-cutting.

Alden Global Capital’s two newspaper chains, MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, make it the second largest owner with about 100 dailies. Alden is often described as the worst newspaper owner in the country, denounced as “vulture capitalists” who slash news coverage and sell off real estate in an attempt to squeeze out as much revenue as possible. Locally, Alden owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.

Soon-Shiong was perhaps the central player in Alden’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing. Whereas MediaNews Group comprises mainly smaller papers, plus a few large dailies such as The Denver Post, Tribune owns eight of the largest, most iconic papers in the country, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and, closer to home, the Hartford Courant.

In the spring of 2021, Tribune, then comprising nine papers, was up for grabs, as it had been many times before. Stewart Bainum, a Baltimore hotel magnate, was attempting to buy the chain and sell off some of its properties to what he hoped would be public-spirited local owners. His main interest was in saving the Sun. Also bidding for the papers Alden. The hedge fund actually offered less money than Bainum, but its offer was reportedly less complicated as well.

The Tribune board ended up voting to sell the papers to Alden — a move that could have been halted by just one board member. Soon-Shiong, who was on the board, abstained, and he did so in a way that mean his vote essentially counted as a yes. As The Washington Post reported at the time, Soon-Shiong submitted his ballot without having checked the “abstain” box; if he had, his vote would have been counted as a “no.”

Bainum went on to found the nonprofit Baltimore Banner. Tribune, meanwhile, spun off one of its most prominent papers, the Daily News of New York, which remains part of the Alden empire as a separately owned entity.

So what’s next for The San Diego Union-Tribune? Nothing good, you can be sure. Voice of San Diego, a nonprofit news site, headlined its story “LA’s Richest Man Sells Union-Tribune to Feared ‘Chop Shop.’” Will Huntsberry and Scott Lewis interviewed the news-business analyst Ken Doctor, who predicted that San Diego will not be rid of Alden anytime soon.

“People get confused because these people are cut-throat capitalists,” Doctor told them. “But their papers are making money and they’re holding onto them for the time being.”

Politico’s look at the LA Times has some interesting tidbits, but it’s hardly a takedown

Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2019 by the World Economic Forum.

Patrick Soon-Shiong came along too late to make the cut. In mid-2018, the celebrity surgeon bought the Los Angeles Times and several other papers for $500 million. My book about a new generation of wealthy newspaper owners, “The Return of the Moguls,” had just been published.

Too bad. Soon-Shiong is at least as interesting as the owners I wrote about: Jeff Bezos, who bought The Washington Post and re-established the legendary paper as a powerhouse; John Henry, who slowly transformed The Boston Globe into a growing and profitable enterprise; and Aaron Kushner, who poured money into the Orange County Register only to fail at attracting enough advertisers and readers to pay for his profligate spending.

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Now Politico has weighed in with a lengthy story about the Times under Soon-Shiong that portrays his ownership as something of a mixed bag. He’s invested in the paper, reversing years of cost-cutting by its previous owner, Tribune Publishing (which for a time was known as tronc), and he’s put a highly regarded editor, Kevin Merida, in charge of the newsroom. But his interest in the paper seems to wax and wane, and his daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, is portrayed as interfering in the newsroom.

I have to say that I’m puzzled by some of the wailing. The Politico article, by Daniel Lippman, Christopher Cadelago and Max Tani, claims that Nika Soon-Shiong has inserted herself into the process of endorsing political candidates as though that were somehow a bad thing. Now, the Times may be making some dumb endorsements, such as its decision to back Nika Soon-Shiong ally Kenneth Mejia for city controller. Mejia, according to the Times’ own reporting, regards both Joe Biden and Donald Trump as “sexual predators.”

But a newspaper’s owners are free to insert themselves into the opinion pages as much as they’d like. A good owner will keep a distance from news operations, but the opinion section is their playground. John and Linda Henry are involved in the Globe’s editorial pages and no one thinks anything of it. Jeff Bezos’ lack of interest in the Post’s opinion operation is unusual.

Nika Soon-Shiong has also expressed her leftist views in a tweet (which she deleted) critical of her own paper’s crime coverage and in suggestions for story coverage. There is, for instance, this, which I find entirely benign, even salutory:

In 2020, Nika Soon-Shiong started participating in staff meetings about the paper’s failures in covering race and how it could become more inclusive in hiring. She suggested the paper avoid using the word “looting” when covering the unrest over police brutality, which inspired the paper to tweak style guidelines.

Times company leaders at the time asked then-top opinion editor Sewell Chan to brainstorm ways that Nika Soon-Shiong could get more involved in the paper. He talked with her about whether working with the opinion section would be a possibility. (Chan declined to comment.)

Politico quotes Merida as saying that Nika Soon-Shiong has “a right to critique our journalism, offer story ideas and other suggestions she believes will help make us better,” and that the “same right is extended to those we cover and to those who read us.” The fact-checker rates that statement as 100% true.

Patrick Soon-Shiong is a bit of an oddball. A profile in The New Yorker last year by Stephen Witt raised questions about his success as a pharmaceutical entrepreneur. But he has been a far better owner of the LA Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, a throw-in that was part of the Times deal, than Tribune Publishing had been. Indeed, Soon-Shiong’s one unforgivable act as a newspaper owner was a non-act — his decision to do nothing to stop the sale of Tribune to the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which of course began gutting its papers as soon as the deal was consummated.

Tribune owns some of our most storied newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant — the oldest continuously published newspaper in the country. Soon-Shiong, a billionaire, could have stopped the transaction and helped Baltimore hotel magnate Stewart Bainum with his bid to buy the chain. Instead, Alden wound up with Tribune, and Bainum has launched a digital nonprofit called The Baltimore Banner. In an interview with Brian Stelter, then of CNN, Soon-Shiong protested that he was a “passive investor,” adding: “I’ve got my hands full and frankly, really committed to the LA Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.”

The Los Angeles Times is far better off under Soon-Shiong family ownership than it had been under years of Tribune mismanagement — mismanagement that would have turned into a rout under Alden. The Politico piece contains some interesting tidbits, but it’s hardly a takedown.

Julie Reynolds on Alden and the botched vote that gave it control of Tribune

On our latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I interview the investigative reporter Julie Reynolds, the scourge of Alden Global Capital. Reynolds gives us the lowdown on Tribune Publishing’s legally dubious vote to sell its nine major-market newspapers to the hedge fund as well as Alden’s relationship with Cerberus Capital Management, the “shadow bank” that helped finance that acquisition.

Other topics include Rocky, Bullwinkle and pink slime. You’ll find more details — and information on how to subscribe to the podcast — right here.