Wednesday Forum Focuses on Saving Local News

Regular readers of this blog know that I regularly post about what Alden Global Capital, the New York vulture hedge fund, has done to The Mercury.

I was cleaning out the crawl space in my attic Sunday (made necessarily by the infiltration of squirrels (don't ask) and had to repack some damaged boxes in which I found old copies of The Mercury I had saved.

Remember This? The Mercury's

Jan. 1, 2000 edition.

There were copies of the Photo of the Century, when we invited everyone in town to get their photo taken next to borough hall on Jan. 1, 2000.

Copies of a five-day series I did on the Schuylkill River, followed the next year by another special publication detailing all seven days of the annual Schuylkill River Sojourn.

There was a five-day series I wrote on water quality, columns about life in Pottstown and even copies of an underground newspaper I put out in high school. (Again, don't ask).

That's the kind of work we don't get the time to do anymore. As The Mercury's only municipal reporter, I do my best to keep track of nine school districts, 30 or so municipalities and any number of other non-profit and community organizations.

During local election years, like this one, the number of races I try to report has been as high as 50. Needless to say, things get missed.

Lots of things.

You can thank Alden.

The newspaper business may indeed be struggling, but we make a profit at The Mercury -- still. 

The sad part is none of that profit is re-invested back into the product producing it. Alden siphons it all off to buy up other "distressed properties" -- like other newspaper chains.

I can't change the staff cuts, the absence of raises, the selling of our iconic downtown building -- all things Alden foisted upon The Mercury and on Pottstown, as it bled our profits to fund their monopoly money capitalism on Wall Street.

But maybe I can help others avoid the same fate. and maybe you can too.

The more Alden has savaged local news, the more people have noticed -- thanks in large part to efforts by the Newspaper Guild, of which I am a proud member, and the reporter the Guild hired to cover one thing and one thing only -- Alden Global Capital.

Investigative reporter Julie Reynolds has revealed as much about the finances of a private hedge funds which hides its money in tax shelters like the Cayman Islands as is probably humanly possible. 

Among the things she has shown is how Alden takes over a company, loads it with debt to make the purchase, then charges outrageous fees to manage that debt and sells off the company's resources, real estate in particular. Sound familiar?

When the profits finally dwindle down to a trickle and the ink turns red, Alden dumps the husk, walks away and sets its sights on another.

Reynolds and myself will be among those speaking as part of an online panel Wednesday dedicated to saving another local paper from Alden's clutches.

The Morning Call is just one of many local papers owned by the Tribune Company. Larger titles you may recognize include The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and The New York Daily News.

Last year, Alden bought a 32 percent stake in Tribune stocks and muscled three of its own people onto the seven-member board of directors. That sent workers at Tribune into a panic, such is Alden's reputation for cuts and debt. 

So intense was that panic that two Chicago Tribune reporters, David Jackson and Gary Marx, took the unusual step of writing an Op-Ed in the New York Times warning that an Alden purchase would lead to “a ghost version of The Chicago Tribune — a newspaper that can no longer carry out its essential watchdog mission.”

Stewart Bainum

One newspaper that worked overtime to escape Alden's clutches was The Baltimore Sun, wrangling a local investor to buy the paper away from Alden. That investor is named Stewart Bainum and he is the chairman of Choice Hotels International. 

But after agreeing on a price of $65 million, Bainum found out what it's like trying to do business with Alden and was stunned when Alden made additional demands, such as paying millions in "fees" over the next few years.

Bainum responded by one-upping Alden and making a counter bid, $20 million more than Alden's, for the entire Tribune chain. Most recently, he garnered help from a Swiss billionaire named Hansjörg Wyss (pronounced Hans-yorg Vees), according to a New York Times report last week. No really, you can't make this stuff up.

Wyss said he was motivated to get involved after reading the Times Op-Ed by Jackson and Marx.

And just yesterday, two more Florida investors stepped up to join Bainum's efforts in order to save "the Orlando Sentinel and the Florida Sun-Sentinel.

What does all this have to do with Pottstown and The Morning Call, based just up the road in Allentown? Essentially, it's the background against which Wednesday's forum will take place.

Like Baltimore, Guild workers at The Call have been working over-time looking for investors or other alternatives to being owned by the company now known nationwide as "the destroyer of newspapers." Who can blame them?

Open to the public, the forum will explain to the community what losing (or eviscerating) the local paper does to the community, and strategies for preventing it, or finding alternatives.

It's open to the public. Why not check it out? To register, go to https://bit.ly/3sTfhoa or, if you have questions, send an email to themorningcallguild@gmail.com