- Will Bunch is a columnist for the Inquirer and Daily News
The problem really hit home for Dave Krieger — the now-former editorial page editor of the Daily Camera in fast-growing Boulder, Colorado — when a lawyer friend sent in a letter to the editor questioning what was happening at his hometown newspaper. The attorney said he didn’t understand why the price of his subscription was just jacked up 20 percent when the actual paper kept showing up with fewer and fewer pages.
Krieger knew exactly why, but at that moment it dawned on him that most citizens in Boulder didn’t know what he knew: That the newspaper’s shrinkage was the direct result of a distant Wall Street hedge fund that — through its investment vehicle with the Orwellian-like dishonest name of Digital First Media — had since 2013 been sucking money in full vampire-squid mode out of the Daily Camera’s newsroom revenue stream. Much of the cash that formerly paid reporters, editors and photojournalists instead went into the pocket of billionaire Randall Smith as Smith added to his collection of multi-million-dollar mansions around Palm Beach and the Hamptons (said at one point to be 18 — that’s not a typo — and counting).
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“The daily paper is the community’s storyteller,” Krieger, a 60-something veteran of a half-dozen newsrooms, thought to himself, “and we’ve never told this story.” So Krieger sat down to write an editorial pleading for help, and what happened next was truly astounding. Randall Smith read it, saw the error of his ways, sold
his mansions, and moved into a modest ranch house as he used the real-estate proceeds to hire a small army of investigative reporters that has begun exposing corporate greed and venal politicians from Key West to Kalamazoo.
Ha ha, just kidding … everything in that last sentence was made up.
What happened in real life is the Daily Camera refused to published the editorial about its corporate owners, and Krieger was fired a couple of days later when he published it on a blog.
And for America’s news consumers, the reality is probably about to get even worse. Digital First Media, a sister firm called MNG and their hedge-fund parent — the Smith-led Alden Global Capital — have launched a hostile takeover bid to gain control of America’s other biggest owner of daily newspapers, Gannett. The takeover bid, which financial experts believe has a good chance of success, would implant DFM/Alden’s money-siphoning brand of vulture capitalism at 300 newspapers from coast-to-coast.
Hedge fund Alden attempts takeover of Gannett newspaper chain https://dfmworkers.org/hedge-fund-alden-attempts-takeover-of-gannett-newspaper-chain/ … 6:02 PM – Jan 14, 2019
Industry experts predict a number of these local news organizations — the primary source of civic information in most of these communities — will be drained dry and die within five years, maybe less. “Consolidation (and the cost-cutting that comes with it) remains the dominant strategy in the daily newspaper industry,” wrote long-time industry watcher Ken Doctor. “If revenue continues to drop at or even near double-digit levels, the consensus thinking is that radically reducing expenses through consolidation is about as good a card as anyone has to play.”
That’s already been a losing hand for places like Boulder — and it could be for Camden County, N.J., or Wilmington, Del., two nearby communities whose Gannett-owned newsrooms are at risk from Randall Smith’s bloody knife of “consolidation” if the hostile takeover succeeds.
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