An older but still very relevant story on Alden Capital from Nieman Labs.
Newsonomics: Alden Global Capital is making so much money wrecking local journalism it might not want to stop anytime soon
Digital First Media’s financials — revealed here — show how the company has ridden its deep cuts to nearly $160 million in profits and the highest margins in the business.
By Ken Doctor @kdoctor May 1, 2018, 10:55 a.m.
niemanlab.org
brief excerpt that cogently states the problem:
It’s been quite a month for the chain. On April 6, The Denver Post’s editorial pages gave public voice to what had been an increasingly urgent (though usually more privately voiced) complaint: Alden’s strategy meant that the Post (and other DFM properties) would be nothing but “rotting bones” soon after the turn of the next decade.
What has followed has been unprecedented. That six-page Post section juiced up the courage of editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett’s peers. In short order, voices of concern have gone public at DFM’s Southern California News Group, at its Bay Area News Group, at its cluster of Philadelphia suburban dailies and just down the road from the Post in Boulder, at the DFM-owned Daily Camera.
It was in Boulder last week that DFM took its first personnel action around the protests. The company fired Daily Camera editorial page editor Dave Krieger. He had published his own in-your-face community plea on April 14. The Camera had rejected the piece for publication, so it appeared online on the Boulder Free Press blog instead.
In his report on his firing for “disparagement,” Krieger lays out the too-familiar details of the long road that led to his protest: “The grounds for firing me I would have understood in the traditional sense was the claim that I disparaged my employer. I certainly did that, although it was in defense of my immediate employer, the Camera, that I disparaged its private equity owners. But this is one of those cases where the very essence of what we are about comes into play. When do we serve our readers, and our obligation to tell them what’s going on? When do we stand up for telling them the truth? When do we quit covering for the unaccountable hedge fund we work for?”
These are questions of the moment. While it’s easy to apply them to Alden alone, given its egregious behavior, they could well to be asked at Sinclair Broadcasting and at too many other “journalism” companies.
Clearly, times have turned tenser for DFM’s chief operating officer Guy Gilmore and his bosses, Heath Freeman and Randy Smith at Alden Global Capital. While none would respond to inquiries, it’s becoming increasingly clear that public pressures have created headaches for them.
Though Krieger is the first DFM employee to be terminated in the current controversies, the company wrestles — almost daily, I’m told by the numerous sources with whom I’ve spoken — with how to deal with the increasingly high-profile criticism. |
