Bought Out

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File 01 · Local news · 1990–2026

Newspapers

The local paper was never a great business in the internet era. Financial owners made it a worse one on purpose. Chains clustered titles, loaded costs, and treated reporting as the expense to shrink. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital became a national force by cutting faster than revenue fell. Readers were asked to subscribe to something smaller. Towns that lost the paper lost the beat reporter at the school board, the courthouse, and the hospital district — the same institutions other files in this ledger cover.

1/3

of U.S. newspapers gone since 2005

Active in

In 2018 The Denver Post’s own newsroom used the Sunday opinion section to call its hedge-fund owner a vulture and ask the city to find a buyer. The paper was arguing, in public, that its owner was the story.

The Denver Post editorial, April 6, 2018

Findings

What closed
More than a third

Northwestern’s Medill Local News Initiative has documented the loss of more than a third of U.S. newspapers since 2005, and hundreds of counties left with little or no dedicated local news.

Who owns the rest
A hedge fund, second

After buying Tribune Publishing in 2021, Alden Global Capital became the second-largest U.S. newspaper owner by circulation, behind Gannett. Titles include the Chicago Tribune and The Denver Post.

What a closure costs
The town’s credit

Gao, Lee, and Murphy, in the Journal of Financial Economics (2020), found that local governments pay more to borrow after a newspaper closes — on the order of 5 to 11 basis points in their study. Less watching has a price.

The playbook, in this industry

  1. 01

    Buy distress, not a future

    Alden and the chain buyers specialized in papers already losing print ads. The acquisition thesis was not a patient digital rebuild. It was that costs, especially journalists, could fall faster than revenue.

  2. 02

    Cluster, then hollow

    Design, copy editing, and even reporting were centralized. A paper that once had a staff for the town became a shell with a familiar masthead and wire copy.

  3. 03

    Sell the building

    Newsrooms sat on downtown real estate. Owners sold it. The civic function did not need a valuable corner. The balance sheet did.

  4. 04

    Charge more for less

    Subscription prices often rose as page counts, print days, and staff fell. The product shrank. The invoice did not.

Incidents

  1. 2007

    Alden Global Capital is founded

    Randall Smith’s hedge fund, run operationally by Heath Freeman, turns toward newspapers. By 2010 it is in control of Digital First / MediaNews Group after a bankruptcy.

  2. 2018

    Denver revolts in print

    Newsroom cuts at The Denver Post produce a public editorial against Alden. The rebellion is famous because it almost never happens: the asset describing its own liquidation.

  3. 2019

    GateHouse buys Gannett

    A chain tied to the investment firm Fortress acquires Gannett and keeps the older name. The merged company is the largest publisher in the country. Buyouts and layoffs become a rhythm, covered round after round by Poynter and Nieman Lab.

  4. 2021

    Tribune Publishing falls

    Alden completes the purchase of Tribune. The Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel and other papers change owners. Newsrooms that fought the bid lose.

  5. 2024–26

    Deserts, not just layoffs

    The story is no longer only shrinking metro papers. Medill’s counts describe counties with no local paper at all, skewed poorer, older, and more rural — the places least able to replace a newsroom with a subscription to a national site.

Case files

Denver, Chicago, and a long list of smaller cities

Alden and the papers that still have the old name

Alden does not need to rename a paper to own it. The masthead is the habit that makes people keep subscribing. What changes is the headcount. Journalists, researchers, and the papers’ own alumni have described newsrooms cut by half or more after an Alden takeover — the precise percentage varies by title, the direction does not. In Denver the staff said it in the paper. In Chicago, a newsroom that had already been reduced was sold to the buyer it had publicly resisted. Smaller dailies in the Digital First orbit lost the reporter who covered the water board, then the reporter who covered the county, until ‘local’ meant a handful of bylines and a lot of shared copy.

The public bill. A subscription to a thinner paper, and a city government nobody is paid to watch.

Hundreds of U.S. cities, one balance sheet

Gannett after the merger

The 2019 combination was sold as scale against Google and Facebook. Scale arrived as shared design hubs, furloughs, and overlapping layoff cycles. Papers dropped print days. Sports sections and opinion pages thinned. The corporate brand stayed sunny. Readers in two neighboring towns could no longer tell, from the product, that anyone was still assigned to their specific controversies — a hospital sale, a jail death, a school-bond campaign. That is the access loss in this file. It does not look like a closed emergency room. It looks like a meeting with no notebook in the room.

The public bill. Less scrutiny, which other research ties to higher public borrowing costs and more room for petty corruption.

What the public lost

Cost

  • Subscription prices that did not fall when newsrooms did
  • Municipalities paying more to borrow after a paper dies, per Gao, Lee, and Murphy
  • Public-relations copy filling the hole where reporting was, which is not free — it is paid by the institutions being covered

Access

  • Hundreds of counties with no dedicated local news source
  • Beat reporting gone: courts, schools, hospitals, zoning
  • ‘Pink slime’ partisan outlets and national feeds that do not replace a reporter at Tuesday’s meeting

The owners’ argument

Owners answer that the internet, Craigslist, and platform advertising killed the business model, and that cuts kept papers from closing outright. The advertising collapse is real. It does not explain why financial owners cut deeper than independent and nonprofit newsrooms facing the same market, or why real estate was sold and newsrooms were not refinanced as civic infrastructure. A paper that survives as a pamphlet is not the same service.

Sources

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