All The News That Stinks To Print

In today’s edition of the Dead Horse Beating Chronicles, we bring up the latest discouraging news about news: Tribune Publishing Co. of Chicago, whose properties include its namesake newspaper along with the New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant, will sell to a massive hedge fund with a history of strip-mining newspapers. 

Alden Global Capital is buying Trib properties for $431 million, according to reports. Included in the package is the Newport News (Va.) Daily Press, my old shop for 30 years, and the Virginian-Pilot, located in Whitneyville. My heart aches for former colleagues and friends at both papers, because I know what’s coming. More cuts, more pain, more misery, and further erosion of local reporting, all in the name of short-term profit. Alden already had its nose in the tent, owning 32 percent of Tribune stock. It’s now bought the entire tent. 

I’ve written about Alden previously in this space. The New York-based hedge fund owns some 200 newspapers around the country, among them the Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News and St. Paul Pioneer-Press. Its M.O. is bloodlessly simple: sell buildings and equipment, cut staff, eliminate expenses, boost the bottom line, funnel profits to investors. The glimmer in this otherwise dismal development is that, as part of the deal, the Tribune spun off the Sun and several affiliated Maryland papers and publications and sold them to a Maryland-based mega-businessman and former state legislator, who will run them through a non-profit. 

No telling how it will work out, but it gives the Sun and Annapolis-based Capital Gazette a chance to continue journalism without the constant threat of the Alden butcher’s knife. Looking at the two southeastern Virginia papers, part of me thinks they’ll be spared because there’s nothing left to cut.  Buildings were sold. There are no newsrooms, and everybody pretty much works from home. They’ve had multiple rounds of cuts in recent years, via Tribune largesse. The skeleton staffs are essentially merged. 

But another part of me thinks, it doesn’t matter. Further cuts are coming, regardless. 

NPR reporter David Folkenflik obtained audio of an address from Tribune editor Colin McMahon to the troops in which he said concerns about Alden ownership are valid. McMahon said that Trib papers are making profit margins in the 10-13 percent range, but that Alden aims for 20 percent profits. 

Newspapers are shrinking and disappearing at an alarming rate. Twenty-five percent of the country’s newspapers shuttered between 2005-2020, according to research by Northwestern University visiting professor Penny Abernathy, who has studied journalism for years. More than two-thirds of U.S. counties have no daily paper. In that same period, 36,000 journalism jobs were lost, Abernathy found, leaving many papers shredded and unable to adequately cover their territories. 

There’s still plenty of quality journalism in urban areas and in regional and national outlets, but the effects of cuts and closures are most acute in smaller towns and rural areas, where local reporting is starting to resemble handwriting experts or Pontiac salesmen. 

A former DP colleague who was a victim of the Tribune axe landed a job as a news editor in Greenville, S.C., where the paper is running stories about the loss of newspapers in the state, and diminished accountability for public officials and businesses. Tales are rampant of small-town clerks and officials siphoning off money for personal use, often because no one is watching. 

One particularly outrageous example: in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, Calif., (pop. 37,000) the town manager increased his own salary from $73,000 per year to $787,000 over a 15-year span. The town police chief was making $457,000 per year, 50 percent more than the police chief of L.A. Residents griped for years about their lavish lifestyles, but the local newspaper had shut down in the 1990s, and Los Angeles newspapers had undergone their own staff cuts and were unable to cover many of the sprawling suburban areas. When Los Angeles County officials finally investigated, they charged eight town officials with embezzling $5.5 million. 

Studies have found that lack of a newspaper diminishes voter turnout and civic engagement, and suggest that local papers also affect municipal spending. Researchers at Notre Dame and Illinois-Chicago found that government officials spent between five and 11 basis points more per issue (about $650,000) in areas without a paper. Their findings indicate that local newspapers hold government accountable, contribute to lower municipal costs and save taxpayers money. 

Nag flogging alert: At a time when an informed citizenry is kind of important, the erosion of local news sources and disappearing newspapers is beyond troubling.