Alden Global Capital Completes $633 Million Tribune Publishing Acquisition - "Vulture" Hedge Fund Becomes Second-Largest U.S. Newspaper Publisher

On May 21, 2021, Tribune Publishing shareholders approved hedge fund Alden Global Capital’s $633 million acquisition of the newspaper chain, making Alden the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States. The transaction gave Alden control over nine major metropolitan dailies including the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News, Hartford Courant, and Orlando Sentinel—newspapers with combined circulations reaching millions of Americans. Alden’s acquisition represented the culmination of a “vulture capitalism” business model that systematically destroys local journalism to extract short-term profits, creating news deserts that undermine democratic accountability.

Alden Global Capital, founded in 2007 by Randall D. Smith and based in Manhattan, had already established a notorious reputation for “plundering newspapers” and “relentlessly creating news deserts and ghost papers.” By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly 200 American newspapers. The hedge fund’s business model was devastatingly simple: acquire newspapers, immediately slash staff by offering aggressive buyout rounds, sell any real estate holdings, increase subscription prices, outsource operations like layout design to the Philippines, and maximize short-term profit margins regardless of the impact on journalism or communities.

Research showed that Alden-owned newspapers “stand out for cutting their staff at twice the rate of their competitors,” according to a 2018 University of North Carolina study. Tribune Publishing was still turning a profit when Alden bought it, but the hedge fund’s playbook was predictable. At the Chicago Tribune, after Alden completed the takeover, reporters no longer had their prestigious downtown newsroom—they were working out of a “Chipotle-sized office” near the printing press. Alden offered a round of buyouts, and a quarter of the newsroom left, including many big-name writers, reporters, columnists, and photographers. As The Atlantic reported in October 2021, “The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.”

The Baltimore Sun newsroom had already been decimated from 400 journalists two decades earlier to only 80 journalists by the time of Alden’s acquisition. Education reporter Liz Bowie organized resistance efforts among journalists, dubbing it “Project Mayhem,” as Tribune employees tried to secure alternative buyers who embraced “the public-minded aspirations of journalism,” including Maryland philanthropist Stewart Bainum Jr. Their efforts failed when Tribune shareholders, focused on maximizing immediate returns, approved the Alden deal.

The democratic consequences of Alden’s newspaper destruction are well-documented and severe. “There’s a huge body of research that shows when a local newspaper either disappears or is significantly diminished, there are downstream effects on the communities they serve,” including dramatically reduced coverage of local government, education, and schools. Since 2005, 2,500 newspapers have closed in the United States—more than 120 newspapers on average closing each year—with hedge fund ownership accelerating the collapse. Communities losing local journalism experience measurably worse outcomes: increased corruption, higher borrowing costs for municipal bonds, reduced voter turnout, and less informed civic participation.

As Rick Goldsmith, director of the 2024 documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink” about Alden’s impact, explained: “You have people who are interested solely in making money off of the newspapers and not in serving the community and doing good journalism… more than half the daily newspapers are either owned or controlled by hedge funds.” The Tribune acquisition meant that prestigious newspapers that had won hundreds of Pulitzer Prizes, broken major investigative stories, and served as essential checks on local power were now controlled by a hedge fund dedicated to extracting maximum profit while providing minimum journalism.

The Alden-Tribune deal demonstrated that traditional market forces and shareholder governance offer no protection for journalism’s democratic function. When newspapers are treated purely as financial assets rather than civic institutions, hedge funds will inevitably choose profit extraction over public service. The acquisition accelerated the creation of “news deserts”—communities without access to reliable local news—leaving citizens without information about local government decisions, school board meetings, zoning changes, or official corruption. This systematic destruction of local journalism infrastructure represents a direct assault on democratic accountability that benefits corrupt officials, unscrupulous corporations, and anyone who prefers to operate without public scrutiny.

The failure to regulate hedge fund ownership of newspapers, or to treat local journalism as essential civic infrastructure requiring protection, allowed Alden to become the second-largest newspaper publisher while operating a business model explicitly designed to destroy the journalism it purported to provide. The Tribune acquisition marked a watershed moment in the collapse of American local journalism and the corresponding weakening of democratic institutions that depend on an informed citizenry.