Media: US ‘Ghost Newspapers’ Struggle for Life
Alden’s $1.4bn bid to buy Gannett has revived questions over the role of hedge funds in a sector that has lost thousands of jobs
By Anna Nicolaou, James Fontanella-Khan and Lindsay Fortado
At the start of 2018, Denver Post journalists felt optimistic for the first time in years. They were about to move headquarters from downtown, where they had conducted their business for a century, to the site of their former printing plant, a 20-minute slog outside the city.
But the explicit downgrade came with an implicit hope: this was rock bottom. After several years of crushing lay-offs, cost-slashing and penny-pinching by the newspaper’s owner, it wasn’t possible to sink any lower.
However, Alden Global Capital, the New York hedge fund that owns Denver’s paper of record, had other plans. A few months after the move, Digital First Media, controlled by Alden, announced it was laying off a third of the newsroom — leaving fewer than 70 reporters to cover a population of 3m people. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, the circulation of the Denver Post has more than halved from 413,676 in 2013 to about 170,000 today.
