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New Day Films
Who is Alden Global Capital and Why Should You Care?
They're beginning to get on my nerves. Who are those guys? ~ Butch Cassidy
It’s no secret that the state of mainstream, print, news has been steadily faltering since the invention of the Internet. However, the advent of the Internet, aside, there are other reasons traditional newspapers have become so hopelessly devoid of serious content.
Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink, a documentary released in 2023 by New Day Films, attempts to shed light on this. It is worth seeing.
The introduction to the film, on the New Day Films website, reads,
“Hedge fund Alden Global Capital is quietly gobbling up newspapers across the country and gutting them, but no one knows why-- until journalist Julie Reynolds begins to investigate. Her findings trigger rebellions across the country by journalists working at Alden-owned newspapers. Backed by the NewsGuild union, the newsmen and women go toe-to-toe with their “vulture capitalist” owners in a battle to save and rebuild local journalism in America. Who will control the future of America’s news ecosystem: Wall Street billionaires concerned only with profit, or those who see journalism as an essential public service, the lifeblood of our democracy?”
Click on the image to watch the trailer
As explained on Wikipedia,
“Alden Global Capital is a hedge fund based in Manhattan, New York City. It was founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith,[2] and is a division of Smith Management LLC.[3][4] Its managing director is Heath Freeman.[2][5] By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers.[6][7] The company operates its media holdings through Digital First Media, which it acquired in 2010 after DMG's parent company, MediaNews Group, declared bankruptcy.[12] With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing in late May 2021, Alden is collectively the second-largest owner of newspapers in the United States, as calculated by average daily print circulation, second only to Gannett.[13]”
Register here for the March 29th Virtual Screening of Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink, at 8:00 pm EST / 5:00 pm PST, with the Media and Democracy Project *
Alden Global Capital appears to have no more than a dozen employees, dispersed in offices in New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas. Their website is the ultimate black box. It has no menu, no “about” page, no content, and no “Contact us” links.
Oddly, it only presents a photo of a peaceful forest with a note below, “Alden Global Capital is an investment manager based in West Palm Beach, FL.”
Perhaps, they have good reason to keep their heads down? It’s hard to find anything flattering about the firm. A September 2022 article on The News Guild’s website, entitled, Boundless Greed: Alden walks away from bills, gathers wealth and guts news organizations, is a tale of woe that is worth reading.
(As noted, Alden Global Capital, itself, appears to be wholly owned by another black box entity called Smith Management LLC. - a company that according to Wikipedia has its origins in R.D. Smith & Company, a firm founded by Randall Duncan Smith (who also founded Alden Global Capital), initially using the $20,000 cash prize he and his wife won on the 1968-1970 gameshow Dream House.)
Another article published in Fast Company, in May of 2024, entitled Alden Global Capital decimated newsrooms, about the irony of Alden suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyrighted content, describes Alden Global Capital and its subsidiaries as follows:
“Alden Global Capital has for years been lambasted as the journalism industry’s “grim reaper.” The investment fund, which owns some 200 publications including such stalwarts as the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel, follows a pretty simple formula: Buy the depressed asset, strip it of its parts, and extract value—all at the expense of the newspapers, and by extension, the communities they serve. In this era of widespread instability in the media sector, Alden-owned newspapers stand out for cutting their staff at twice the rate of their competitors, according to a 2018 study by University of North Carolina researchers.”
In these times, this kind of Gordon Gecko-ism is no longer very new news, and you might be wondering why I’m bothering to highlight it. But, I just wanted to let our California readers know just how far Alden Global Capital’s influence is on content you may be assuming is being provided by a publisher that has the overriding goal of doing hard-hitting journalism.
To that end, here is a partial list of the more than 500+(?) newspapers that are controlled by Alden Global Capital and its wholly owned subsidiaries, such as MediaNews Group, which itself is the 7th largest news organization in the U.S. that owns over 400 daily newspapers and non-dailies in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and in both northern and southern California.
Alden Global Capital Newspapers
Baltimore Sun
Chicago Tribune
New York Daily News
Orlando Sentinel (part of Tribune Publishing)
San Diego Union-Tribune
The Boston Herald
MediaNews Group Newspapers
Bennington Banner
Brattleboro Reformer
Burlingame Daily News
Chico Enterprise-Record
Daily Breeze
Daily Democrat
East Bay Daily News
El Paso Times
Kodiak Daily Mirror
Los Gatos Daily News
North Adams Transcript
Oakland Tribune
Press-Telegram
Redwood City Daily News
Reporter-Herald
San Mateo County Times
San Mateo Daily News
Saratoga News
Sentinel & Enterprise
St. Paul Pioneer Press
The Denver Post
The Detroit News
The Mercury News
The Monterey County Herald
The Reporter (Vacaville)
The San Bernardino Sun
The Sun (Lowell)
Tri-Valley Herald
California Newspapers Partnership (Subsidiary of MediaNews Group)
Alameda Times-Star
Contra Costa Times
Daily Democrat
Daily News (Red Bluff)
East County Times
Enterprise Record
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Lake County Record Bee
Long Beach Press Telegram
Los Angeles Daily News
Marin Independent Journal
Orange County Register
Oroville Mercury Register
Pasadena Star-News
Redlands Daily Facts
Riverside Press-Enterprise
San Gabriel Valley Tribune
San Jose Mercury News
Santa Cruz Sentinel
The Argus (Fremont)
The Daily News (Palo Alto)
The Sun (San Bernardino)
Times-Standard
Torrance Daily Breeze
Ukiah Daily Journal
Vacaville Reporter
Vallejo Times Herald
Whittier Daily News
It almost seems like if you don’t count the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Alden Global Capital, or perhaps I should say Smith Management LLC, controls all the so-called “local news” in our state. But, though we might find this morally indefensible, this is just what our system of unfettered capitalism does, it consolidates power and maximizes the extraction of wealth, regardless of the civic consequences. Newspapers are just another commodity to be exploited.
As an interesting footnote, I was told by one of the SF Bay Area Alden Global Capital newspaper managers that because their budgets are cut to the bone, none of the San Francisco Bay Area newspapers can afford to have a single, paid, investigative reporter on staff: food for thought for the next time you get the feeling that you’re not being told the whole story. And, a good reason to support local, grassroots, citizen journalism.
Bob Silvestri is a long-time Mill Valley resident, the Editor of the Marin Post, and the founder and president of Community Venture Partners, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community organization dedicated to bringing the community's voice to government decision-making and funded exclusively by individuals and nonprofit donors. Please consider donating now to support our work.