2021.10.14 一个神秘的对冲基金正在摧毁新闻编辑室

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A SECRETIVE HEDGE FUND IS GUTTING NEWSROOMS
Inside Alden Global Capital

By McKay Coppins
OCTOBER 14, 2021
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The tribune tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of Gothic spires and flying buttresses that were designed to exude power and prestige. When plans for the building were announced in 1922, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime owner of the Chicago Tribune, said he wanted to erect “the world’s most beautiful office building” for his beloved newspaper. The best architects of the era were invited to submit designs; lofty quotes about the Fourth Estate were selected to adorn the lobby. Prior to the building’s completion, McCormick directed his foreign correspondents to collect “fragments” of various historical sites—a brick from the Great Wall of China, an emblem from St. Peter’s Basilica—and send them back to be embedded in the tower’s facade. The final product, completed in 1925, was an architectural spectacle unlike anything the city had seen before—“romance in stone and steel,” as one writer described it. A century later, the Tribune Tower has retained its grandeur. It has not, however, retained the Chicago Tribune.


To find the paper’s current headquarters one afternoon in late June, I took a cab across town to an industrial block west of the river. After a long walk down a windowless hallway lined with cinder-block walls, I got in an elevator, which deposited me near a modest bank of desks near the printing press. The scene was somehow even grimmer than I’d imagined. Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.

Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune these days, and you’ll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. This is the story we’ve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and it’s not without truth. But what’s happening in Chicago is different.

In May, the Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country. 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.

Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the state’s undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter who’d helped expose the governor’s offshore shell companies. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone.

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The hollowing-out of the Chicago Tribune was noted in the national press, of course. There were sober op-eds and lamentations on Twitter and expressions of disappointment by professors of journalism. But outside the industry, few seemed to notice. Meanwhile, the Tribune’s remaining staff, which had been spread thin even before Alden came along, struggled to perform the newspaper’s most basic functions. After a powerful Illinois state legislator resigned amid bribery allegations, the paper didn’t have a reporter in Springfield to follow the resulting scandal. And when Chicago suffered a brutal summer crime wave, the paper had no one on the night shift to listen to the police scanner.

Read: What we lost when Gannett came to town

As the months passed, things kept getting worse. Morale tanked; reporters burned out. The editor in chief mysteriously resigned, and managers scrambled to deal with the cuts. Some in the city started to wonder if the paper was even worth saving. “It makes me profoundly sad to think about what the Trib was, what it is, and what it’s likely to become,” says David Axelrod, who was a reporter at the paper before becoming an adviser to Barack Obama. Through it all, the owners maintained their ruthless silence—spurning interview requests and declining to articulate their plans for the paper. Longtime Tribune staffers had seen their share of bad corporate overlords, but this felt more calculated, more sinister.

A stack of Chicago Tribune newspapers, tied together as a bundle with yellow police tape that has black text "Crime Scene Do Not Cross"
Ricardo Rey
“It’s not as if the Tribune is just withering on the vine despite the best efforts of the gardeners,” Charlie Johnson, a former Metro reporter, told me after the latest round of buyouts this summer. “It’s being snuffed out, quarter after quarter after quarter.” We were sitting in a coffee shop in Logan Square, and he was still struggling to make sense of what had happened. The Tribune had been profitable when Alden took over. The paper had weathered a decade and a half of mismanagement and declining revenues and layoffs, and had finally achieved a kind of stability. Now it might be facing extinction.


“They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think that’s honestly a misnomer,” Johnson said. “A vulture doesn’t hold a wounded animal’s head underwater. This is predatory.”

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When alden first started buying newspapers, at the tail end of the Great Recession, the industry responded with cautious optimism. These were not exactly boom times for newspapers, after all—at least someone wanted to buy them. Maybe this obscure hedge fund had a plan. One early article, in the trade publication Poynter, suggested that Alden’s interest in the local-news business could be seen as “flattering” and quoted the owner of The Denver Post as saying he had “enormous respect” for the firm. Reading these stories now has a certain horror-movie quality: You want to somehow warn the unwitting victims of what’s about to happen.

Of course, it’s easy to romanticize past eras of journalism. The families that used to own the bulk of America’s local newspapers—the Bonfilses of Denver, the Chandlers of Los Angeles—were never perfect stewards. They could be vain, bumbling, even corrupt. At their worst, they used their papers to maintain oppressive social hierarchies. But most of them also had a stake in the communities their papers served, which meant that, if nothing else, their egos were wrapped up in putting out a respectable product.

The model is simple: gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring out as much cash as possible.
The 21st century has seen many of these generational owners flee the industry, to devastating effect. In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. Those that have survived are smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable to acquisition. Today, half of all daily newspapers in the U.S. are controlled by financial firms, according to an analysis by the Financial Times, and the number is almost certain to grow.


What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.

John Temple: My newspaper died 10 years ago. I’m worried the worst is yet to come.

The men who devised this model are Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital. Since they bought their first newspapers a decade ago, no one has been more mercenary or less interested in pretending to care about their publications’ long-term health. Researchers at the University of North Carolina found that Alden-owned newspapers have cut their staff at twice the rate of their competitors; not coincidentally, circulation has fallen faster too, according to Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst who reviewed data from some of the papers. That might sound like a losing formula, but these papers don’t have to become sustainable businesses for Smith and Freeman to make money.


With aggressive cost-cutting, Alden can operate its newspapers at a profit for years while turning out a steadily worse product, indifferent to the subscribers it’s alienating. “It’s the meanness and the elegance of the capitalist marketplace brought to newspapers,” Doctor told me. So far, Alden has limited its closures primarily to weekly newspapers, but Doctor argues it’s only a matter of time before the firm starts shutting down its dailies as well.

This investment strategy does not come without social consequences. When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. Misinformation proliferates. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the 2016 election in places with limited access to local news.

With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing earlier this year, Alden now controls more than 200 newspapers, including some of the country’s most famous and influential: the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the New York Daily News. It is the nation’s second-largest newspaper owner by circulation. Some in the industry say they wouldn’t be surprised if Smith and Freeman end up becoming the biggest newspaper moguls in U.S. history.


They are also defined by an obsessive secrecy. Alden’s website contains no information beyond the firm’s name, and its list of investors is kept strictly confidential. When lawmakers pressed for details last year on who funds Alden, the company replied that “there may be certain legal entities and organizational structures formed outside of the United States.”

Smith, a reclusive Palm Beach septuagenarian, hasn’t granted a press interview since the 1980s. Freeman, his 41-year-old protégé and the president of the firm, would be unrecognizable in most of the newsrooms he owns. For two men who employ thousands of journalists, remarkably little is known about them.

If you want to know what it’s like when Alden Capital buys your local newspaper, you could look to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where coverage of local elections in more than a dozen communities falls to a single reporter working out of his attic and emailing questionnaires to candidates. You could look to Oakland, California, where the East Bay Times laid off 20 people one week after the paper won a Pulitzer. Or to nearby Monterey, where the former Herald reporter Julie Reynolds says staffers were pushed to stop writing investigative features so they could produce multiple stories a day. Or to Denver, where the Post’s staff was cut by two-thirds, evicted from its newsroom, and relocated to a plant in an area with poor air quality, where some employees developed breathing problems.


But maybe the clearest illustration is in Vallejo, California, a city of about 120,000 people 30 miles north of San Francisco. When John Glidden first joined the Vallejo Times-Herald, in 2014, it had a staff of about a dozen reporters, editors, and photographers. Glidden, then a mild-mannered 30-year-old, had come to journalism later in life than most and was eager to prove himself. He started as a general-assignment reporter, covering local crime and community events. The pay was terrible and the work was not glamorous, but Glidden loved his job. A native of Vallejo, he was proud to work for his hometown paper. It felt important.

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A month after he started, one of his fellow reporters left and Glidden was asked to start covering schools in addition to his other responsibilities. When the city-hall reporter left a few months later, he picked up that beat too. Glidden had heard rumblings about the paper’s owners when he first took the job, but he hadn’t paid much attention. Now he was feeling the effects of their management.

It turned out that those owners—New York hedge funders whom Glidden took to calling “the lizard people”—were laser-focused on increasing the paper’s profit margins. Year after year, the executives from Alden would order new budget cuts, and Glidden would end up with fewer co-workers and more work. Eventually he was the only news reporter left on staff, charged with covering the city’s police, schools, government, courts, hospitals, and businesses. “It played with my mind a little bit,” Glidden told me. “I felt like a terrible reporter because I couldn’t get to everything.”


He gained 100 pounds and started grinding his teeth at night. He used his own money to pull court records, and went years without going on a vacation. Tips that he would never have time to investigate piled up on a legal pad he kept at his desk. At one point, he told me, the city’s entire civil-service commission was abruptly fired without explanation; his sources told him something fishy was going on, but he knew he’d never be able to run down the story.

Meanwhile, with few newsroom jobs left to eliminate, Alden continued to find creative ways to cut costs. The paper’s printing was moved to a plant more than 100 miles outside town, Glidden told me, which meant that the news arriving on subscribers’ doorsteps each morning was often more than 24 hours old. The “newsroom” was moved to a single room rented from the local chamber of commerce. Layout design was outsourced to freelancers in the Philippines.

Frustrated and worn out, Glidden broke down one day last spring when a reporter from The Washington Post called. She was writing about Alden’s growing newspaper empire, and wanted to know what it was like to be the last news reporter in town. “It hurts to see the paper like this,” he told her. “Vallejo deserves better.” A few weeks after the story came out, he was fired. His editor cited a supposed journalistic infraction (Glidden had reported the resignation of a school superintendent before an agreed-upon embargo). But Glidden felt sure he knew the real reason: Alden wanted him gone.

Clear zip-lock bag with forensic "Evidence" label that contains a crumpled page from a newspaper
Ricardo Rey
The story of Alden Capital begins on the set of a 1960s TV game show called Dream House. A young man named Randall Duncan Smith—Randy for short—stands next to his wife, Kathryn, answering quick-fire trivia questions in front of a live studio audience. The show’s premise pits two couples against each other for the chance to win a home. When the Smiths win, they pass on the house and take the cash prize instead—a $20,000 haul that Randy will eventually use to seed a small trading firm he calls R.D. Smith & Company.


A Cornell grad with an M.B.A., Randy is on a partner track at Bear Stearns, where he’s poised to make a comfortable fortune simply by climbing the ladder. But he has a big idea: He believes there’s serious money to be made in buying troubled companies, steering them into bankruptcy, and then selling them off in parts. The term vulture capitalism hasn’t been invented yet, but Randy will come to be known as a pioneer in the field. He scores big with a bankrupt aerospace manufacturer, and again with a Dallas-based drilling company.

By the 1980s, this strategy has made Randy luxuriously wealthy—vacations in the French Riviera, a family compound outside New York City—and he has begun to school his children on the wonders of capitalism. He teaches his 8-year-old son, Caleb, to make trades on a Quotron computer, and imparts the value of delayed gratification by reportedly postponing his family’s Christmas so that he can use all their available cash to buy stocks at lower prices in December. Caleb will later recall, in an interview with D Magazine, asking his dad why he works so hard.

“It’s a game,” Randy explains to his son.

“How do you know who wins?” the boy asks.


“Whoever dies with the most money.”

Even in the “greed is good” climate of the era, Randy is a polarizing character on Wall Street. When The New York Times profiles him in 1991, it notes that he excels at “profiting from other people’s misery” and quotes a parade of disgruntled clients and partners. “The one central theme,” the Times reports, “seems to be that Smith and its web of affiliates are out, first and foremost, for themselves.” If this reputation bothers Randy and his colleagues, they don’t let on: For a while, according to The Village Voice, his firm proudly hangs a painting of a vulture in its lobby.

Around this time, Randy becomes preoccupied with privacy. He stops talking to the press, refuses to be photographed, and rarely appears in public. One acquaintance tells The Village Voice that “he’s the kind of guy who divests himself every couple of years” to avoid ending up on lists of the world’s richest people.

How exactly Randall Smith chose Heath Freeman as his protégé is a matter of speculation among those who have worked for the two of them.
Most of his investments are defined by a cold pragmatism, but he takes a more personal interest in the media sector. With his own money, he helps his brother launch the New York Press, a free alt-weekly in Manhattan. Russ Smith is a puckish libertarian whose self-described “contempt” for the journalistic class animates the pages of the publication. “I’m repulsed by the incestuous world of New York journalism,” he tells New York magazine. He writes a weekly column called “Mugger” that savages the city’s journalists by name and frequently runs to 10,000 words.

Randy claims no editorial role in the Press, and his investment in the project—which has little chance of producing the kind of return he’s accustomed to—could be chalked up to brotherly loyalty. But years later, when Randy relocates to Palm Beach and becomes a major donor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it will make a certain amount of sense that his earliest known media investment was conceived as a giant middle finger to the journalistic establishment.

How exactly randall smith chose Heath Freeman as his protégé is a matter of speculation among those who have worked for the two of them. In conversations with former Alden employees, I heard repeatedly that their partnership seemed to transcend business. “They had a father-figure relationship,” one told me. “They were very tight.” Freeman has resisted elaborating on his relationship with Smith, saying simply that they were family friends before going into business together.

Freeman’s father, Brian, was a successful investment banker who specialized in making deals on behalf of labor unions. After serving in the Carter administration’s Treasury Department, Brian became widely known—and feared—in the ’80s for his hard-line negotiating style. “I sort of bully people around to get stuff done,” he boasted to The Washington Post in 1985. The details of how Smith got to know him are opaque, but the resulting loyalty was evident.

After Brian took his own life, in 2001, Smith became a mentor and confidant to Heath, who was in college at the time of his father’s death. Several years later, when Heath was still in his mid-20s, Smith co-founded Alden Global Capital with him, and eventually put him in charge of the firm.

People who know him described Freeman—with his shellacked curls, perma-stubble, and omnipresent smirk—as the archetypal Wall Street frat boy. “If you went into a lab to create the perfect bro, Heath would be that creation,” says one former executive at an Alden-owned company, who, like others in this story, requested anonymity to speak candidly. Freeman would show up at business meetings straight from the gym, clad in athleisure, the executive recalled, and would find excuses to invoke his college-football heroics, saying things like “When I played football at Duke, I learned some lessons about leadership.” (Freeman was a walk-on placekicker on a team that won no games the year he played.)

When Alden first got into the news business, Freeman seemed willing to indulge some innovation. The firm oversaw the promotion of John Paton, a charismatic digital-media evangelist, who improved the papers’ web and mobile offerings and increased online ad revenue. In 2011, Paton launched an ambitious initiative he called “Project Thunderdome,” hiring more than 50 journalists in New York and strategically deploying them to supplement short-staffed local newsrooms. For a fleeting moment, Alden’s newspapers became unexpected darlings of the journalism industry—written about by Poynter and Nieman Lab, endorsed by academics like Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis. But by 2014, it was becoming clear to Alden’s executives that Paton’s approach would be difficult to monetize in the short term, according to people familiar with the firm’s thinking. Reinventing their papers could require years of false starts and fine-tuning—and, most important, a delayed payday for Alden’s investors.

So Freeman pivoted. He shut down Project Thunderdome, parted ways with Paton, and placed all of Alden’s newspapers on the auction block. When the sale failed to attract a sufficiently high offer, Freeman turned his attention to squeezing as much cash out of the newspapers as possible.

Alden’s calculus was simple. Even in a declining industry, the newspapers still generated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues; many of them were turning profits. For Freeman and his investors to come out ahead, they didn’t need to worry about the long-term health of the assets—they just needed to maximize profits as quickly as possible.

Read: Local news is dying, and Americans have no idea

From 2015 to 2017, he presided over staff reductions of 36 percent across Alden’s newspapers, according to an analysis by the NewsGuild (a union that also represents employees of The Atlantic). At the same time, he increased subscription prices in many markets; it would take awhile for subscribers—many of them older loyalists who didn’t carefully track their bills—to notice that they were paying more for a worse product. Maybe they’d cancel their subscriptions eventually; maybe the papers would fold altogether. But as long as Alden had made back its money, the investment would be a success. (Freeman denied this characterization through a spokesperson.)

Freeman hectored publishers, demanding that they produce budget numbers off the top of their head. His marching orders were always the same: Cut more.
Crucially, the profits generated by Alden’s newspapers did not go toward rebuilding newsrooms. Instead, the money was used to finance the hedge fund’s other ventures. In legal filings, Alden has acknowledged diverting hundreds of millions of dollars from its newspapers into risky bets on commercial real estate, a bankrupt pharmacy chain, and Greek debt bonds. To industry observers, Alden’s brazen model set it apart even from chains like Gannett, known for its aggressive cost-cutting. Alden “is not a newspaper company,” says Ann Marie Lipinski, a former editor in chief of the Chicago Tribune. “It’s a hedge that went and bought up some titles that it milks for cash.”

Even as Alden’s portfolio grew, Freeman rarely visited his newspapers. When he did, he exhibited a casual contempt for the journalists who worked there. On more than one occasion, according to people I spoke with, he asked aloud, “What do all these people do?” According to the former executive, Freeman once suggested in a meeting that Alden’s newspapers could get rid of all their full-time reporters and rely entirely on freelancers. (Freeman denied this through a spokesperson.) In my many conversations with people who have worked with Freeman, not one could recall seeing him read a newspaper.

From the March 1914 issue: H. L. Mencken on newspaper morals

A story circulated throughout the company—possibly apocryphal, though no one could say for sure—that when Freeman was informed that The Denver Post had won a Pulitzer in 2013, his first response was: “Does that come with any money?”

In budget meetings, according to the former executive, Freeman hectored local publishers, demanding that they produce detailed numbers off the top of their head and then humiliating them when they couldn’t. But for all the theatrics, his marching orders were always the same: Cut more.

“It was clear that they didn’t care about this being a business in the future. It was all about the next quarter’s profit margins,” says Matt DeRienzo, who worked as a publisher for Alden’s Connecticut newspapers before finally resigning.

Another ex-publisher told me Freeman believed that local newspapers should be treated like any other commodity in an extractive business. “To him, it’s the same as oil,” the publisher said. “Heath hopes the well never runs dry, but he’s going to keep pumping until it does. And everyone knows it’s going to run dry.”

On march 9, 2020, a small group of Baltimore Sun reporters convened a secret meeting at the downtown Hyatt Regency. Alden Global Capital had recently purchased a nearly one-third stake in the Sun’s parent company, Tribune Publishing, and the firm was signaling that it would soon come for the rest. By that point, Alden was widely known as the “grim reaper of American newspapers,” as Vanity Fair had put it, and news of the acquisition plans had unleashed a wave of panic across the industry.

But there was still a sliver of hope: Tribune and Alden agreed that the hedge fund would not increase its stake in the company for at least seven months. That gave the journalists at the Sun a brief window to stop the sale from going through. The question was how.

In the Hyatt meeting, Ted Venetoulis, a former Baltimore politician, advised the reporters to pick a noisy public fight: Set up a war room, circulate petitions, hold events to rally the city against Alden. If they did it right, Venetoulis said, they just might be able to line up a local, civic-minded owner for the paper. The pitch had a certain romantic appeal to the reporters in the room. “Baltimore is an underdog town,” Liz Bowie, a Sun reporter who was at the meeting, told me. “We were like, They’re not going to take our newspaper from us! ”

From the February 1905 issue: The confessions of a newspaper woman

The paper’s union hired a PR firm to launch a public-awareness campaign under the banner “Save Our Sun” and published a letter calling on the Tribune board to sell the paper to local owners. Soon, Tribune-owned newsrooms across the country were kicking off similar campaigns. “We were in collective revolt,” Lillian Reed, a Sun reporter who helped organize the campaign, told me. When the journalists created a Slack channel to coordinate their efforts across multiple newspapers, they dubbed it “Project Mayhem.”

In Orlando, the Sentinel ran an editorial pleading with the community to “deliver us from Alden” and comparing the hedge fund to “a biblical plague of locusts.” In Allentown, Pennsylvania, reporters held reader forums where they tried to instill a sense of urgency about the threat Alden posed to The Morning Call. The movement gained traction in some markets, with local politicians and celebrities expressing solidarity. But even for a group of journalists, it was tough to keep the public’s attention. After a contentious presidential race and amid a still-raging pandemic, there was a limited supply of outrage and sympathy to spare for local reporters. When the Chicago Tribune held a “Save Local News” rally, most of the people who showed up were members of the media.

Meanwhile, reporters fanned out across their respective cities in search of benevolent rich people to buy their newspapers. The most promising prospect materialized in Baltimore, where a hotel magnate named Stewart Bainum Jr. expressed interest in the Sun. Earnest and unpolished, with a perpetually mussed mop of hair, Bainum presented himself as a contrast to the cutthroat capitalists at Alden. As a young man, he’d studied at divinity school before taking over his father’s company, and decades later he still carried a healthy sense of noblesse oblige. He took particular pride in finding novel ways to give away his family fortune, funding child-poverty initiatives in Baltimore and prenatal care for women in Liberia.

Bainum told me he’d come to appreciate local journalism in the 1970s while serving in the Maryland state legislature. At the time, the Sun had a bustling bureau in Annapolis, and he marveled at the reporters’ ability to sort the honest politicians from the “political whores” by exposing abuses of power. “You have no way of knowing that if you don’t have some nosy son of a bitch asking a lot of questions down there,” he told me.

Bainum envisioned rebuilding the paper—which, by 2020, was down to a single full-time statehouse reporter—as a nonprofit. In February 2021, he announced a handshake deal to buy the Sun from Alden for $65 million once it acquired Tribune Publishing.

But within weeks, Bainum said, Alden tried to tack on a five-year licensing deal that would have cost him tens of millions more. (Freeman has, in the past, disputed Bainum’s account of the negotiations.) Feeling burned by the hedge fund, Bainum decided to make a last-minute bid for all of Tribune Publishing’s newspapers, pledging to line up responsible buyers in each market. For those who cared about the future of local news, it was hard to imagine a better outcome—which made it all the more devastating when the bid fell through.

What exactly went wrong would become a point of bitter debate among the journalists involved in the campaigns. Some expressed exasperation with the staff of the Chicago Tribune, who were unable to find a single interested local buyer. Others pointed to Bainum’s financing partner, who pulled out of the deal at the 11th hour. The largest share of the blame was assigned to the Tribune board for allowing the sale to Alden to go through. Freeman, meanwhile, would later gloat to colleagues that Bainum was never serious about buying the newspapers and just wanted to bask in the worshipful media coverage his bid generated.

But beneath all the recriminations and infighting was a cruel reality: When faced with the likely decimation of the country’s largest local newspapers, most Americans didn’t seem to care very much. “It was like watching a slow-motion disaster,” says Gregory Pratt, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune.

Alden completed its takeover of the Tribune papers in May. It financed the deal with the help of Cerberus—a private-equity firm that owned, among other businesses, the security company that trained Saudi operatives who participated in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Three days later, Bainum—still smarting from his experience with Alden, but worried about the Sun’s fate—sent a pride-swallowing email to Freeman. After congratulating him on closing the deal, Bainum said he was still interested in buying the Sun if Alden was willing to negotiate. Freeman never responded.

Red street-corner newspaper dispenser with "The Baltimore Sun" logo lying on its side with glass window smashed and newspaper spilling out, surrounded by numbered yellow evidence markers from a murder scene
Ricardo Rey
Shortly after the Tribune deal closed earlier this year, I began trying to interview the men behind Alden Capital. I knew they almost never talked to reporters, but Randall Smith and Heath Freeman were now two of the most powerful figures in the news industry, and they’d gotten there by dismantling local journalism. It seemed reasonable to ask that they answer a few questions.

My request for an interview with Smith was dismissed by his spokesperson before I finished asking. A reporter at one of his newspapers suggested I try “doorstepping” Smith—showing up at his home unannounced to ask questions from the porch. But it turned out that Smith had so many doorsteps—16 mansions in Palm Beach alone, as of a few years ago, some of them behind gates—that the plan proved impractical. At one point, I tracked down the photographer who’d taken the only existing picture of Smith on the internet. But when I emailed his studio looking for information, I was informed curtly that the photo was “no longer available.” Had Smith bought the rights himself? I asked. No response came back.

Freeman was only slightly more accessible. He declined to meet me in person or to appear on Zoom. After weeks of back-and-forth, he agreed to a phone call, but only if parts of the conversation could be on background (which is to say, I could use the information generally but not attribute it to him). On the appointed afternoon, I dialed the number provided by his spokesperson and found myself talking to the most feared man in American newspapers.

When I asked Freeman what he thought was broken about the newspaper industry, he launched into a monologue that was laden with jargon and light on insight—summarizing what has been the conventional wisdom for a decade as though it were Alden’s discovery. “Many of the operators were looking at the newspaper business as a local advertising business,” he said, “and we didn’t believe that was the right way to look at it. This is a subscription-based business.”

Freeman was more animated when he turned to the prospect of extracting money from Big Tech. “We must finally require the online tech behemoths, such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, to fairly compensate us for our original news content,” he told me. He had spoken on this issue before, and it was easy to see why. Many in the journalism industry, watching lawsuits play out in Australia and Europe, have held out hope in recent years that Google and Facebook will be compelled to share their advertising revenue with the local outlets whose content populates their platforms. Some have even suggested that this represents America’s last chance to save its local-news industry. But for that to happen, the Big Tech money would need to flow to underfunded newsrooms, not into the pockets of Alden’s investors.

Before our interview, I’d contacted a number of Alden’s reporters to find out what they would ask their boss if they ever had the chance. Most responded with variations on the same question: Which recent stories from your newspapers have you especially appreciated? I put the question to Freeman, but he declined to answer on the record.

Freeman was clearly aware of his reputation for ruthlessness, but he seemed to regard Alden’s commitment to cost-cutting as a badge of honor—the thing that distinguished him from the saps and cowards who made up America’s previous generation of newspaper owners. “Prior to the acquisition of the Tribune Company, we purchased substantially all of our newspapers out of bankruptcy or close to liquidation,” he told me. “These papers were in many cases left for dead by local families not willing to make the tough but appropriate decisions to get these news organizations to sustainability. These papers would have been liquidated if not for us stepping up.”

This was the core of Freeman’s argument. But while it’s true that Alden entered the industry by purchasing floundering newspapers, not all of them were necessarily doomed to liquidation. More to the point, Tribune Publishing—which represents a substantial portion of Alden’s titles—was profitable at the time of the acquisition.

There’s little evidence that Alden cares about the “sustainability” of its newspapers. A more honest argument might have claimed, as some economists have, that vulture funds like Alden play a useful role in “creative destruction,” dismantling outmoded businesses to make room for more innovative insurgents. But in the case of local news, nothing comparable is ready to replace these papers when they die. Some publications, such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, have developed successful long-term models that Alden’s papers might try to follow. But that would require slow, painstaking work—and there are easier ways to make money.

In truth, Freeman didn’t seem particularly interested in defending Alden’s reputation. When he’d agreed to the interview, I’d expected him to say the things he was supposed to say—that the layoffs and buyouts were necessary but tragic; that he held local journalism in the highest esteem; that he felt a sacred responsibility to steer these newspapers toward a robust future. I would know he didn’t mean it, and he would know he didn’t mean it, but he would at least go through the motions.

But I had underestimated how little Alden’s founders care about their standing in the journalism world. For Freeman, newspapers are financial assets and nothing more—numbers to be rearranged on spreadsheets until they produce the maximum returns for investors. For Smith, the Palm Beach conservative and Trump ally, sticking it to the mainstream media might actually be a perk of Alden’s strategy. Neither man will ever be the guest of honor at the annual dinner for the Committee to Protect Journalists—and that’s probably fine by them. It’s hard to imagine they’d show, anyway.

About a month after The Baltimore Sun was acquired by Alden, a senior editor at the paper took questions from anxious reporters on Zoom. The new owners had announced a round of buyouts, some beloved staffers were leaving, and those who remained were worried about the future. When a reporter asked if their work was still valued, the editor sounded deflated. He said that he still appreciated their journalism, but that he couldn’t speak for his corporate bosses.

“This company that owns us now seems to still be pretty—I don’t even know how to put it,” the editor said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Atlantic. “We don’t hear from them ... They’re, like, nameless, faceless people.”

In the months that followed, the Sun did not immediately experience the same deep staff cuts that other papers did. Reporters kept reporting, and editors kept editing, and the union kept looking for ways to put pressure on Alden. But a sense of fatalism permeated the work. “It feels like we’re going up against capitalism now,” Lillian Reed, the reporter who helped launch the “Save Our Sun” campaign, told me. “Am I going to win against capitalism in America? Probably not.”

To David Simon, the whimpering end of The Baltimore Sun feels both inevitable and infuriating. A former Sun reporter whose work on the police beat famously led to his creation of The Wire on HBO, Simon told me the paper had suffered for years under a series of blundering corporate owners—and it was only a matter of time before an enterprise as cold-blooded as Alden finally put it out of its misery.

“The bad stuff runs for so long now,” David Simon told me, “that by the time you get to it, institutions are irreparable, or damn near close.”
Like many alumni of the Sun, Simon is steeped in the paper’s history. He can cite decades-old scoops and tell you whom they pissed off. He quotes H. L. Mencken, the paper’s crusading 20th-century columnist, on the joys of journalism: It is really the life of kings. At the Sun’s peak, it employed more than 400 journalists, with reporters in London and Tokyo and Jerusalem. Its World War II correspondent brought firsthand news of Nazi concentration camps to American readers; its editorial page had the power to make or break political careers in Maryland.

But for Simon, that paper exists entirely in the past. With Alden in control, he believes the Sun is “now a prisoner” that stands little chance of escape. What most concerns him is how his city will manage without a robust paper keeping tabs on the people in charge. “The practical effect of the death of local journalism is that you get what we’ve had,” he told me, “which is a halcyon time for corruption and mismanagement and basically misrule.”

When Simon called me, he was on the set of his new miniseries, We Own This City, which tells the true story of Baltimore cops who spent years running their own drug ring from inside the police department. By the time the FBI caught them, in 2017, the conspiracy had resulted in one dead civilian and a rash of wrongful arrests and convictions. The show draws from a book written by a Sun reporter, and Simon was quick to point out that the paper still has good journalists covering important stories. But he couldn’t help feeling that the police scandal would have been exposed much sooner if the Sun were operating at full force.

Baltimore has always had its problems, he told me. “But if you really started fucking up in grandiose and belligerent ways, if you started stealing and grifting and lying, eventually somebody would come up behind you and say, ‘You’re grifting and you’re lying’ … and they’d put it in the paper.”

“The bad stuff runs for so long now,” he went on, “that by the time you get to it, institutions are irreparable, or damn near close.”

Take away the newsroom packed with meddling reporters, and a city loses a crucial layer of accountability. What happens next? Unless the Tribune’s trajectory changes, Chicago may soon provide a grim case study. For Baltimore to avoid a similar fate, Simon told me, something new would have to come along—a spiritual heir to the Sun: “A newspaper is its contents and the people who make it. It’s not the name or the flag.”

He may get his wish. Stewart Bainum, since losing his bid for the Sun, has been quietly working on a new venture. Convinced that the Sun won’t be able to provide the kind of coverage the city needs, he has set out to build a new publication of record from the ground up. In recent months, he’s been meeting with leaders of local-news start-ups across the country—The Texas Tribune, the Daily Memphian, The City in New York—and collecting best practices. He’s impressed by their journalism, he told me, but his clearest takeaway is that they’re not nearly well funded enough. To replace a paper like the Sun would require a large, talented staff that covers not just government, but sports and schools and restaurants and art. “You need real capital to move the needle,” he told me. Otherwise, “you’re just peeing in the ocean.”

Next year, Bainum will launch The Baltimore Banner, an all-digital, nonprofit news outlet. He told me it will begin with an annual operating budget of $15 million, unprecedented for an outfit of this kind. It will rely initially on philanthropic donations, but he aims to sell enough subscriptions to make it self-sustaining within five years. He’s acutely aware of the risks—“I may end up with egg on my face,” he said—but he believes it’s worth trying to develop a successful model that could be replicated in other markets. “There’s no industry that I can think of more integral to a working democracy than the local-news business,” he said.

The Banner will launch with about 50 journalists—not far from the size of the Sun—and an ambitious mandate. One tagline he was considering was “Maryland’s Best Newsroom.”

When I asked, half in jest, if he planned to raid the Sun to staff up, he responded with a muted grin. “Well,” he told me, “they have some very good reporters.”

This article appears in the November 2021 print edition with the headline “The Men Who Are Killing America’s Newspapers.”

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic.





一个神秘的对冲基金正在摧毁新闻编辑室
阿尔登全球资本的内部情况

作者：McKay Coppins
10月14日, 2021
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护民官塔耸立在芝加哥市中心的街道上，由哥特式尖顶和飞扶壁组成，气势磅礴，旨在散发出权力和威望。当1922年宣布该建筑的计划时，芝加哥论坛报的长期所有者罗伯特-R-麦考密克上校说，他想为他心爱的报纸建立 "世界上最美丽的办公大楼"。那个时代最好的建筑师被邀请提交设计方案；关于第四财产的崇高名言被选来装饰大厅。在大楼竣工之前，麦考密克指示他的外国记者收集各种历史遗迹的 "碎片"--中国长城的砖头、圣彼得大教堂的徽章--并将它们送回，以嵌入塔楼的外墙中。最终产品于1925年完成，是该市前所未有的建筑奇观--正如一位作家所描述的，"石头和钢铁的浪漫"。一个世纪过去了，论坛报大厦仍然保持着它的宏伟气势。然而，它并没有保留《芝加哥论坛报》。


6月下旬的一个下午，为了找到该报目前的总部，我打车穿过市区，来到河西的一个工业区。在一条没有窗户的走廊上走了很久，两边都是煤渣墙，我坐上了电梯，电梯把我送到了印刷厂附近的一个不大的办公桌旁。这场面比我想象的还要严峻。这里是美国最具传奇色彩的报纸之一--一份曾为亚伯拉罕-林肯背书、为《凡尔赛条约》挖角的出版物，一份曾推翻政治老板、与腐败的市长纠缠在一起并获得数十项普利策奖的报纸--被缩减为一个只有Chipotle大小的新闻室。

这些天，在《论坛报》那些惊魂未定的记者身边待上一段时间，你会反复听到同一个问题。事情怎么会变成这样？表面上看，答案似乎很明显。克雷格列表（Craigslist）扼杀了分类栏目，谷歌和脸书吞噬了广告市场，而一众无能的报社老板却未能适应数字媒体时代的发展，使得报社被淘汰成为必然。这就是我们几十年来一直在讲述的关于濒临死亡的地方新闻业的故事，它不是没有道理。但在芝加哥发生的事情是不同的。

5月，《论坛报》被Alden Global Capital收购，这是一个秘密的对冲基金，它已经迅速地、非常容易地成为全国最大的报纸运营商之一。新老板没有飞到芝加哥向员工讲话，也没有费力地颂扬新闻业的重要公民作用。相反，他们把这个地方开膛破肚。

交易完成两天后，奥尔登宣布了一轮积极的收购行动。在随后的大逃亡中，报纸失去了曾为一个麻烦的公共住房小区的住户辩护的地铁专栏作家，失去了维护警方无法操纵的凶杀案数据库的编辑，失去了为该州无证移民制作精美肖像的摄影师，失去了帮助揭露州长的离岸空壳公司的调查记者。当事情结束时，四分之一的新闻编辑部已经消失。

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当然，《芝加哥论坛报》的空洞化在全国性媒体上得到了关注。推特上有冷静的专栏文章和哀叹，新闻学教授们也表达了失望之情。但在行业之外，似乎很少有人注意到。与此同时，《论坛报》剩下的员工，甚至在奥尔登出现之前就已经很稀疏了，他们在努力履行报纸的最基本职能。在伊利诺伊州一位有权势的州议员因受贿指控而辞职后，该报在斯普林菲尔德没有一个记者来关注由此产生的丑闻。当芝加哥遭遇残酷的夏季犯罪浪潮时，该报没有人在夜班上收听警方的扫描仪。

阅读。当甘尼特来到这里时，我们失去了什么？

随着时间的推移，事情越来越糟。士气低落，记者们疲惫不堪。总编辑神秘地辞职了，经理们争先恐后地处理裁员的问题。城里的一些人开始怀疑这份报纸是否值得拯救。"大卫-阿克塞尔罗德（David Axelrod）说："一想到《论坛报》曾经是什么，现在是什么，以及它可能会变成什么，我就感到深深的难过。在这一切中，老板们保持着无情的沉默--拒绝采访要求，拒绝阐述他们对报纸的计划。长期以来，《论坛报》的员工已经看到了他们的那份糟糕的企业霸主，但这次感觉更有计划，更阴险。

一堆《芝加哥论坛报》的报纸，用黄色的警察胶带捆绑成一捆，上面有黑色的文字 "犯罪现场请勿穿越"。
里卡多-雷伊
"尽管园丁们尽了最大努力，但《论坛报》并不是在藤蔓上枯萎，"今年夏天最新一轮收购之后，前地铁记者查理-约翰逊告诉我。"它正在被扼杀，一季又一季。" 我们坐在洛根广场的一家咖啡馆里，他还在努力理解所发生的一切。奥尔登接手时，《论坛报》一直是盈利的。该报经历了十年半的管理不善、收入下降和裁员，终于实现了某种程度的稳定。现在，它可能面临灭顶之灾。


"他们称Alden为秃鹫对冲基金，我认为这确实是个错误的说法，"约翰逊说。"秃鹰不会把受伤的动物的头放在水下。这是掠夺性的。"

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当Alden公司第一次开始购买报纸时，正值经济大衰退的尾声，整个行业以谨慎的乐观态度作出回应。毕竟，这并不是报纸的繁荣时期--至少有人想购买它们。也许这个不起眼的对冲基金有一个计划。贸易出版物《Poynter》上的一篇早期文章指出，Alden对本地新闻业务的兴趣可以被视为 "奉承"，并引用《丹佛邮报》老板的话说，他对该公司 "非常尊重"。现在读这些故事有一种恐怖电影的感觉。你想以某种方式警告那些不知情的受害者即将发生的事情。

当然，将过去的新闻业时代浪漫化是很容易的。曾经拥有美国大部分地方报纸的家族--丹佛的Bonfilses，洛杉矶的Chandlers，从来都不是完美的管理者。他们可能是虚荣的、笨拙的，甚至是腐败的。在他们最坏的情况下，他们利用他们的报纸来维持压迫性的社会等级制度。但是，他们中的大多数人也与他们的报纸所服务的社区有利害关系，这意味着，如果没有其他原因，他们的自我意识被包裹在推出一个值得尊敬的产品中。

这种模式很简单：裁减员工，出售房地产，抬高订阅价格，并尽可能多地榨取现金。
在21世纪，许多这些世代的业主逃离了这个行业，造成了毁灭性的影响。在过去的15年中，超过四分之一的美国报纸已经倒闭。那些幸存下来的报纸规模较小，实力较弱，而且更容易被收购。根据《金融时报》的分析，今天，美国所有日报中有一半被金融公司控制，而且这个数字几乎可以肯定还会增长。


现在威胁到地方报纸的不仅仅是数字化的破坏或抽象的市场力量。他们的目标是投资者，他们已经找到了如何通过剥离地方新闻机构来致富。这种模式很简单。遣散员工，出售房地产，抬高订阅价格，并尽可能多地从企业中榨取现金，直到最终有足够多的读者取消订阅，使报纸倒闭，或沦为前者的干枯躯壳。

约翰-坦普尔。我的报纸10年前就死了。我担心最糟糕的情况还在后面。

设计这种模式的人是兰德尔-史密斯和希斯-弗里曼，他们是阿尔登全球资本的联合创始人。自从十年前他们买下第一份报纸以来，没有人比他们更唯利是图，也没有人比他们更喜欢假装关心出版物的长期健康。北卡罗来纳大学的研究人员发现，阿尔登旗下的报纸以两倍于其竞争对手的速度裁员；据审查了一些报纸数据的新闻行业分析师Ken Doctor称，并非巧合，发行量也下降得更快。这听起来像是一个失败的公式，但这些报纸不一定要成为可持续发展的企业，史密斯和弗里曼才会赚钱。


通过积极的成本削减，阿尔登公司可以在多年内以盈利的方式经营其报纸，同时推出越来越差的产品，对它所疏远的用户漠不关心。"这是资本主义市场的卑鄙和优雅带给报纸的，"博士告诉我。到目前为止，Alden公司将其关闭的报纸主要限于周报，但Doctor认为，该公司开始关闭其日报只是时间问题。

这种投资策略并不是没有社会后果。研究表明，当一家地方报纸消失时，往往会出现选民投票率下降、两极分化加剧以及公民参与度普遍下降的情况。误导性信息泛滥。城市预算膨胀，伴随着腐败和功能障碍。这些后果也会影响到国家政治；Politico的一项分析发现，唐纳德-特朗普在2016年大选期间在当地新闻渠道有限的地方表现最好。

随着今年早些时候对论坛报出版公司的收购，奥尔登现在控制了200多家报纸，包括一些全国最著名和最有影响力的报纸：《芝加哥论坛报》、《巴尔的摩太阳报》、《纽约每日新闻》。按发行量计算，它是美国第二大报纸所有者。一些业内人士说，如果史密斯和弗里曼最终成为美国历史上最大的报纸大亨，他们不会感到惊讶。


他们也被一种强迫性的保密性所定义。阿尔登公司的网站上除了公司名称外没有任何信息，其投资者名单也被严格保密。去年，当立法者追问谁为阿尔登公司提供资金的细节时，该公司回答说，"可能有某些法律实体和组织结构是在美国之外形成的。"

史密斯是一位隐居在棕榈滩的七旬老人，自20世纪80年代以来没有接受过媒体采访。弗里曼是他41岁的门徒，也是公司的总裁，在他所拥有的大多数新闻编辑室里，他都不会被认出来。对于这两个雇佣了数千名记者的人来说，人们对他们的了解明显不足。

如果你想知道阿尔登资本收购当地报纸的情况，你可以看看宾夕法尼亚州的蒙哥马利县，那里有十几个社区的地方选举报道，只有一个记者在他的阁楼上工作，通过电子邮件向候选人发送调查问卷。你可以看看加利福尼亚的奥克兰，《东湾时报》在获得普利策奖一周后就解雇了20人。或者去附近的蒙特雷，那里的前先驱报记者朱莉-雷诺兹（Julie Reynolds）说，工作人员被催促停止写调查性的专题报道，以便他们能在一天内制作多个故事。或者去丹佛，在那里，邮报的员工被削减了三分之二，被赶出了新闻编辑室，并被迁往空气质量差的地区的一个工厂，一些员工出现了呼吸问题。


但最明显的例子也许是在加利福尼亚州的瓦莱乔，一个在旧金山以北30英里的约12万人的城市。2014年，当约翰-格莱登(John Glidden)第一次加入《瓦莱乔时报-先驱报》时，该报有大约十几名记者、编辑和摄影师的员工。Glidden当时是一个温和的30岁的人，比大多数人更晚进入新闻业，并渴望证明自己。他开始时是一名普通的特派记者，报道当地的犯罪和社区事件。工资很低，工作也不吸引人，但格莱登热爱他的工作。作为瓦列霍人，他为能为家乡的报纸工作而感到自豪。这感觉很重要。

玛格丽特-沙利文。没有本地新闻，宪法就无法发挥作用

在他开始工作一个月后，他的一位同事离开了，格莱登被要求在其他职责之外开始报道学校。几个月后，当市政厅的记者离开时，他也接手了这个报道。格莱登在刚接手这份工作时就听到了关于报社老板的流言蜚语，但他并没有太在意。现在他感受到了他们管理的影响。

事实证明，这些业主--纽约的对冲基金，格莱登称之为 "蜥蜴人"--都专注于提高报纸的利润率。年复一年，来自奥尔登的高管们会下令削减新的预算，而格莱登最终将面临更少的同事和更多的工作。最终，他成为员工中唯一剩下的新闻记者，负责报道该市的警察、学校、政府、法院、医院和企业。"这对我的思想有一点影响，"格莱登告诉我。"我觉得自己是个糟糕的记者，因为我无法接触到所有东西。"


他体重增加了100磅，并开始在晚上磨牙。他用自己的钱来调取法庭记录，并多年没有去度假。那些他永远没有时间调查的线索堆积在他办公桌前的法律垫上。他告诉我，有一次，整个城市的公务员委员会在没有解释的情况下突然被解雇了；他的消息来源告诉他，这里面有猫腻，但他知道他永远无法追查到这个故事。

与此同时，由于新闻编辑部没有多少工作可以取消，奥尔登继续寻找创造性的方法来削减成本。格莱登告诉我，报纸的印刷被移到城外100多英里的工厂，这意味着每天早上送到订户家门口的新闻往往是24小时前的。新闻室 "被搬到了一个从当地商会租来的单间里。版面设计被外包给菲律宾的自由职业者。

去年春天的一天，当《华盛顿邮报》的一名记者打来电话时，格莱登感到沮丧和疲惫，他崩溃了。她正在写关于奥尔登不断增长的报纸帝国的文章，并想知道作为镇上最后一名新闻记者的感受。"他告诉她："看到报纸变成这样，我很难过。"瓦莱乔应该得到更好的待遇。" 报道出来几周后，他被解雇了。他的编辑以所谓的新闻违规为由（格莱登在商定的禁运前报道了一位学校校长的辞职）。但格莱登认为他知道真正的原因。奥尔登希望他离开。

带有法医 "证据 "标签的透明拉链袋，里面有一张皱巴巴的报纸页面
里卡多-雷伊
奥尔登资本的故事开始于20世纪60年代一个名为 "梦想屋 "的电视游戏节目的拍摄现场。一个名叫兰德尔-邓肯-史密斯（Randall Duncan Smith）的年轻人站在他的妻子凯瑟琳（Kathryn）身边，在演播室的现场观众面前回答快速的小问题。该节目的前提是让两对夫妇互相竞争，以获得赢得一栋房子的机会。当史密斯夫妇获胜时，他们放弃了房子，转而获得了现金奖励--2万美元，兰迪最终将用这笔钱创办一家小型贸易公司，他称之为R.D. Smith & Company。


兰迪毕业于康奈尔大学，拥有工商管理硕士学位，是贝尔斯登公司的合伙人，在那里他准备通过攀登阶梯来赚取一笔舒适的财富。但他有一个大的想法：他认为购买陷入困境的公司，引导它们进入破产程序，然后把它们分成几部分卖掉，是可以赚大钱的。秃鹫资本主义这个词还没有被发明出来，但兰迪将被称为该领域的先驱者。他在一家破产的航空航天制造商身上大获全胜，又在一家位于达拉斯的钻探公司身上大获全胜。

到20世纪80年代，这种策略使兰迪变得非常富有--在法国里维埃拉度假，在纽约市外有一个家庭院落--而且他已经开始让他的孩子学习资本主义的奥妙。他教他8岁的儿子凯莱布在Quotron电脑上做交易，并传授延迟满足的价值，据说他推迟了家人的圣诞节，以便在12月用他们所有的现金以较低的价格购买股票。凯莱布后来回忆说，在接受《D》杂志采访时，他问他的父亲为什么如此努力工作。

"这是一个游戏，"兰迪向他的儿子解释。

"你怎么知道谁赢了？"男孩问道。


"谁死后得到的钱最多"。

即使在那个时代的 "贪婪是好事 "的氛围中，兰迪也是华尔街的一个两极化人物。当《纽约时报》在1991年介绍他时，指出他擅长 "从别人的痛苦中获利"，并引用了一系列不满的客户和合作伙伴的说法。"泰晤士报》报道说："一个中心主题是，史密斯及其附属机构的网络首先是为了自己。" 如果这种声誉困扰着兰迪和他的同事，他们也不会说出来。据《乡村之声》报道，有一段时间，他的公司在大厅里自豪地挂着一幅秃鹰的画。

大约在这个时候，兰迪开始专注于隐私问题。他不再与媒体交谈，拒绝被拍照，也很少出现在公众面前。一位熟人告诉《乡村之声》，"他是那种每隔几年就把自己掏空的人"，以避免最终出现在世界富豪榜上。

兰德尔-史密斯究竟是如何选择希斯-弗里曼作为他的门徒的，这在为他们两人工作过的人中是一个猜测的问题。
他的大多数投资都是由冷酷的实用主义决定的，但他对媒体部门有更多的个人兴趣。他用自己的钱帮助他的兄弟创办了曼哈顿的免费另类周刊《纽约新闻》（New York Press）。拉斯-史密斯是一个古怪的自由主义者，他自称对新闻阶层的 "蔑视 "使该出版物的版面充满了活力。"他告诉《纽约》杂志："我对纽约新闻业的乱伦世界感到厌恶。他每周写一篇名为 "Mugger "的专栏，点名批评该市的记者，并经常写到一万字。

兰迪声称自己在新闻界没有任何编辑角色，他对这个项目的投资--这个项目几乎不可能产生他所习惯的那种回报--可以说是出于兄弟般的忠诚。但多年后，当兰迪搬到棕榈滩并成为唐纳德-特朗普总统竞选的主要捐助者时，他最早的媒体投资是作为对新闻机构的一个巨大的中指而设想的，这将有一定的意义。

兰德尔-史密斯究竟是如何选择希斯-弗里曼作为他的门徒的，这在那些曾为他们两人工作过的人中是一个猜测的问题。在与奥尔登公司前雇员的交谈中，我反复听到他们的合作关系似乎超越了业务。"他们有一种父亲式的关系，"一个人告诉我。"他们非常紧密。" 弗里曼一直拒绝详细说明他与史密斯的关系，只是说他们在一起做生意之前是家庭朋友。

弗里曼的父亲布莱恩是一位成功的投资银行家，擅长代表工会做交易。在卡特政府的财政部任职后，布莱恩因其强硬的谈判风格而在80年代广为人知--也令人畏惧。1985年，他向《华盛顿邮报》吹嘘说："我有点儿欺负人，以完成任务"。史密斯如何认识他的细节并不清楚，但由此产生的忠诚度是显而易见的。

2001年布莱恩自杀后，史密斯成为希斯的导师和知己，父亲去世时，希斯还在读大学。几年后，当希斯还在20多岁时，史密斯与他共同创立了阿尔登全球资本公司，并最终让他负责公司的工作。

认识他的人把弗里曼--他那头被剥了壳的卷发、永久的胡茬和无处不在的傻笑--描述为典型的华尔街兄弟会男孩。"如果你进入实验室创造一个完美的兄弟，希斯将是那个创造者，"一位奥尔登旗下公司的前高管说，他和本故事中的其他人一样，要求匿名，以便坦诚相见。这位高管回忆说，弗里曼会直接从健身房出来，穿着运动休闲服参加商务会议，并会找借口援引他的大学橄榄球英雄事迹，说 "当我在杜克大学打橄榄球时，我学到了一些关于领导力的经验"。(弗里曼是一个步行者，在他打球的那一年，他所在的球队没有赢得任何比赛）。

当奥尔登第一次进入新闻行业时，弗里曼似乎愿意放纵一些创新。该公司监督了约翰-帕顿的晋升，他是一位富有魅力的数字媒体布道者，改善了报纸的网络和移动产品，增加了在线广告收入。2011年，帕顿发起了一项雄心勃勃的计划，他称之为 "雷霆计划"，在纽约雇佣了50多名记者，并将他们战略性地部署到人员短缺的地方新闻编辑室。在一个转瞬即逝的时刻，奥尔登的报纸出人意料地成为新闻业的宠儿--《波恩特》和《尼曼实验室》都对其进行了报道，杰伊-罗森和杰夫-贾维斯等学者也对其表示赞同。但据熟悉该公司想法的人说，到了2014年，阿尔登的高管们逐渐明白，帕顿的方法很难在短期内实现货币化。重塑他们的论文可能需要多年的错误开始和微调，而且最重要的是，Alden的投资者的发薪日会被推迟。

所以弗里曼改变了方向。他关闭了 "雷霆计划"，与帕顿分道扬镳，并将阿尔登的所有报纸放在拍卖场上。当拍卖未能吸引到足够高的报价时，弗里曼将注意力转移到尽可能多地从报纸中榨取现金。

奥尔登的计算方法很简单。即使在一个衰退的行业中，这些报纸仍然创造了数亿美元的年收入；其中许多报纸正在实现盈利。对于弗里曼和他的投资者来说，他们不需要担心资产的长期健康状况，他们只需要尽可能快地实现利润最大化。

阅读。地方新闻正在消亡，而美国人对此一无所知

根据NewsGuild（一个同时代表《大西洋月刊》员工的工会）的分析，从2015年到2017年，他主持了奥尔登旗下各家报纸36%的人员裁减。与此同时，他在许多市场上提高了订阅价格；订阅者--其中许多是没有仔细跟踪账单的老忠诚者--需要一段时间才能注意到他们为更糟糕的产品支付了更多费用。也许他们最终会取消订阅；也许报纸会完全倒闭。但只要Alden公司赚回了钱，这项投资就是成功的。(弗里曼通过发言人否认了这一说法）。

弗里曼对出版商们大发雷霆，要求他们凭空拿出预算数字。他的命令总是一样的：削减更多。
最重要的是，奥尔登的报纸所产生的利润并没有用于重建新闻编辑室。相反，这些钱被用来资助对冲基金的其他企业。在法律文件中，Alden承认从其报纸中挪用了数亿美元，对商业房地产、一家破产的连锁药店和希腊债务债券进行了高风险的投注。在行业观察家看来，Alden的厚颜无耻模式甚至使它与以积极削减成本著称的甘尼特（Gannett）等连锁企业区分开来。Alden "不是一家报纸公司"，《芝加哥论坛报》的前主编安-玛丽-利平斯基说。"它是一家对冲公司，它去买了一些标题，然后用这些标题来赚取现金。"

即使奥尔登的投资组合不断扩大，弗里曼也很少访问他的报纸。当他访问时，他对在那里工作的记者表现出一种随意的蔑视。据与我交谈的人说，他不止一次地大声问道："这些人都是干什么的？" 据前主管说，弗里曼曾在一次会议上建议奥尔登的报纸可以取消所有的全职记者，完全依靠自由职业者。(弗里曼通过发言人否认了这一点。)在我与曾与弗里曼共事的人的多次交谈中，没有人记得曾见过他读过报纸。

摘自1914年3月的期刊。门肯（H. L. Mencken）关于报纸道德的文章

在整个公司流传着一个故事--可能是不真实的，尽管没有人能够确定--当弗里曼被告知《丹佛邮报》在2013年赢得了普利策奖时，他的第一反应是。"那有什么钱吗？"

据这位前高管说，在预算会议上，弗里曼对当地出版商大发雷霆，要求他们从头到尾拿出详细的数字，如果他们做不到，就会羞辱他们。但尽管如此，他的命令总是一样的：削减更多。

"很明显，他们并不关心这是一个未来的企业。马特-德里恩佐（Matt DeRienzo）说，他曾在阿尔登的康涅狄格州报纸担任出版商，最后辞职。

另一位前出版商告诉我，弗里曼认为地方报纸应该像其他采掘业的商品一样被对待。"对他来说，这和石油是一样的，"这位出版商说。"希斯希望油井永远不会枯竭，但他会继续抽油，直到它枯竭为止。而每个人都知道它将会枯竭。"

2020年3月9日，一小群巴尔的摩太阳报记者在市中心的凯悦酒店召开了一次秘密会议。阿尔登全球资本最近购买了《太阳报》母公司论坛报出版公司近三分之一的股份，该公司发出信号，它很快就会来收购其余的股份。到那时，正如《名利场》所言，阿尔登已被广泛认为是 "美国报纸的死神"，收购计划的消息在整个行业掀起了一阵恐慌。

但仍有一丝希望。论坛报和Alden同意，对冲基金至少在七个月内不会增加其在公司的股份。这给《太阳报》的记者们提供了一个短暂的窗口，以阻止销售的进行。问题是如何阻止。

在凯悦酒店的会议上，前巴尔的摩政治家泰德-维尼图利斯建议记者们在公开场合进行喧闹的斗争。建立一个作战室，散发请愿书，举办活动，召集全城反对奥尔登。维尼托利斯说，如果他们做得好，他们就有可能为报纸找到一个有公民意识的当地老板。对于在场的记者来说，这种宣传方式具有某种浪漫的吸引力。参加会议的《太阳报》记者Liz Bowie告诉我，"巴尔的摩是一个落后的城市"。"我们想，他们不会把我们的报纸从我们这里拿走的！ "

摘自1905年2月的期刊。一个女报人的自白

该报的工会雇用了一家公关公司，在 "拯救我们的太阳 "的旗帜下发起了一场公众意识运动，并发表了一封信，呼吁《论坛报》董事会将报纸卖给当地业主。很快，全国各地的《论坛报》所属的新闻编辑部也开始了类似的活动。"帮助组织这项运动的《太阳报》记者莉莉安-里德(Lillian Reed)告诉我，"我们是在集体反抗。当记者们创建了一个Slack频道来协调他们在多家报纸上的努力时，他们将其称为 "混乱计划"。

在奥兰多，《哨兵报》发表了一篇社论，恳求社区 "将我们从奥尔登手中解救出来"，并将该对冲基金比作 "圣经中的蝗虫灾祸"。在宾夕法尼亚州的阿伦敦，记者们举行了读者论坛，他们试图向读者灌输一种关于奥尔登对《晨报》构成威胁的紧迫感。这一运动在一些市场上获得了牵引力，当地的政治家和名人都表示了声援。但是，即使是一群记者，要保持公众的注意力也很困难。在有争议的总统竞选之后，在仍在肆虐的大流行病中，对当地记者来说，愤怒和同情的供应有限。当《芝加哥论坛报》举行 "拯救本地新闻 "的集会时，大多数到场的人是媒体成员。

与此同时，记者们在各自的城市里寻找仁慈的富人来购买他们的报纸。最有希望的前景出现在巴尔的摩，一位名叫小斯图尔特-贝纳姆的酒店大亨表示对《太阳报》感兴趣。贝纳姆认真而不加修饰，头发总是乱糟糟的，他与奥尔登的那些残酷的资本家形成了鲜明的对比。年轻时，他在接管父亲的公司之前曾在神学院学习，几十年后，他仍然带着一种健康的贵族责任感。他特别自豪的是，他找到了新的方法来捐献他的家族财富，资助巴尔的摩的儿童贫困计划和利比里亚妇女的产前护理。

贝纳姆告诉我，他在20世纪70年代为马里兰州立法机构服务时，就开始欣赏当地的新闻工作。当时，《太阳报》在安纳波利斯有一个热闹的分社，他惊叹于记者们通过揭露权力滥用而将诚实的政治家从 "政治妓女 "中分出来的能力。"他告诉我："如果你没有一些爱管闲事的狗娘养的在下面问很多问题，你就没有办法知道这些。

贝纳姆设想重建该报--到2020年，该报只剩下一个全职的州政府记者--作为一个非营利组织。2021年2月，他宣布了一项握手协议，一旦奥尔登收购论坛报出版公司，他将以6500万美元的价格从奥尔登手中购买太阳报。

但贝纳姆说，在几周内，奥尔登试图增加一项为期五年的许可协议，这将使他多花数千万。(Freeman过去曾对Bainum关于谈判的说法提出异议。)Bainum感到被对冲基金所伤，决定在最后一刻出价收购Tribune出版公司的所有报纸，并承诺在每个市场上寻找负责的买家。对于那些关心本地新闻未来的人来说，很难想象会有更好的结果--这也使得竞标失败后更具有破坏性。

究竟哪里出了问题，成为参与竞选的记者们激烈争论的焦点。一些人对《芝加哥论坛报》的工作人员表示愤慨，他们无法找到一个感兴趣的当地买家。其他人则把矛头指向贝纳姆的融资伙伴，他在第11个小时退出了交易。最大的责任在于论坛报董事会，因为他们允许向奥尔登出售。与此同时，弗里曼后来还向同事们幸灾乐祸地表示，贝纳姆从来没有认真对待过收购报纸，他只是想沉浸在他的竞标所带来的崇拜性媒体报道中。

但在所有的指责和内讧之下，是一个残酷的现实。当面对全国最大的地方报纸可能被砍掉时，大多数美国人似乎并不关心。"芝加哥论坛报》的记者格雷戈里-普拉特说："这就像在看一场慢动作的灾难。

阿尔登公司于5月完成了对《论坛报》的收购。它在Cerberus的帮助下为这笔交易提供了资金，Cerberus是一家私人股权公司，除其他业务外，还拥有一家培训参与谋杀记者贾马尔-卡舒吉的沙特特工的安保公司。

三天后，贝纳姆--他仍在为与阿尔登的合作经历耿耿于怀，但又担心太阳公司的命运--给弗里曼发了一封消除自尊的电子邮件。在祝贺他完成交易后，贝纳姆说，如果奥尔登愿意谈判，他仍有兴趣购买《太阳报》。弗里曼从未回应。

带有 "巴尔的摩太阳报 "标志的红色街角发报机侧躺着，玻璃窗被砸碎，报纸溢出，周围是谋杀现场的黄色编号证据标记。
里卡多-雷伊
今年年初《论坛报》的交易结束后不久，我开始尝试采访阿尔登资本背后的人。我知道他们几乎从不与记者交谈，但兰德尔-史密斯和希斯-弗里曼现在是新闻业中最有权势的两个人物，而他们是通过瓦解地方新闻业而达到这个目的的。要求他们回答几个问题似乎是合理的。

我要求采访史密斯，还没问完，就被他的发言人驳回了。他的一家报纸的记者建议我尝试 "上门 "采访史密斯--不经通知就出现在他家，在门廊上提问。但事实证明，截至几年前，史密斯仅在棕榈滩就有16座豪宅，其中一些在大门后面，所以这个计划是不切实际的。有一次，我找到了在互联网上为史密斯拍摄唯一现存照片的摄影师。但当我给他的工作室发电子邮件寻求信息时，我被委婉地告知，这张照片 "不再可用"。史密斯自己买了版权吗？我问道。没有得到任何回复。

弗里曼只是稍稍容易接近。他拒绝与我见面，也拒绝在Zoom上出现。经过几周的来回奔波，他同意打电话，但前提是谈话的部分内容可以是背景资料（也就是说，我可以普遍使用这些信息，但不能把它归于他）。在约定的下午，我拨通了他的发言人提供的号码，发现自己正在与美国报纸上最令人恐惧的人交谈。

当我问弗里曼他认为报业有什么问题时，他开始了一段充满专业术语而又缺乏洞察力的独白--把十年来的传统智慧总结得好像是阿尔登的发现。他说："许多经营者都把报纸业务看成是一种本地广告业务，"他说，"我们认为这不是看待它的正确方式。这是一项基于订阅的业务。"

当他谈到从大科技公司提取资金的前景时，弗里曼更加激动。"他告诉我："我们必须最终要求谷歌、苹果和Facebook等在线科技巨头为我们的原创新闻内容提供公平的补偿。他以前就这个问题发表过意见，很容易看出原因。新闻界的许多人看着澳大利亚和欧洲的诉讼案，近年来一直希望谷歌和脸书将被迫与那些内容充斥其平台的当地媒体分享其广告收入。一些人甚至认为，这代表了美国拯救其本地新闻业的最后机会。但要做到这一点，大科技公司的资金需要流向资金不足的新闻编辑部，而不是流入阿尔登的投资者的口袋。

在我们采访之前，我联系了一些阿尔登的记者，想知道如果他们有机会的话，会向他们的老板问些什么。大多数人的回答都是同一个问题的变体。你特别欣赏你们报纸最近的哪些故事？我向弗里曼提出了这个问题，但他拒绝公开回答。

弗里曼显然知道他无情的名声，但他似乎把奥尔登对削减成本的承诺视为一种荣誉勋章--把他与构成美国上一代报业老板的那些笨蛋和懦夫区别开来。"他告诉我："在收购论坛报公司之前，我们基本上都是在破产或接近清算的情况下购买的报纸。"这些报纸在许多情况下被当地家庭抛弃，不愿意做出艰难但适当的决定，以使这些新闻机构能够持续发展。如果不是我们挺身而出，这些报纸可能已经被清算了。"

这就是弗里曼论点的核心。但是，尽管奥尔登确实是通过收购陷入困境的报纸进入这个行业的，但并非所有的报纸都注定要被清算。更重要的是，论坛报出版公司--它在阿尔登的报纸中占很大一部分--在收购时是盈利的。

几乎没有证据表明Alden公司关心其报纸的 "可持续性"。一个更诚实的论点可能会像一些经济学家那样声称，像Alden这样的秃鹫基金在 "创造性破坏 "中发挥了有益的作用，拆除过时的企业，为更多的创新叛乱者腾出空间。但就本地新闻而言，没有任何类似的东西可以在这些报纸死亡时取代它们。一些出版物，如《明尼阿波利斯明星论坛报》，已经开发出成功的长期模式，奥尔登的报纸可以尝试效仿。但这需要缓慢而艰苦的工作--而且还有更容易赚钱的方法。

事实上，弗里曼似乎对维护奥尔登的声誉并不特别感兴趣。当他同意接受采访时，我以为他会说他应该说的话--裁员和收购是必要的，但也是悲剧性的；他对当地的新闻业怀有最崇高的敬意；他感到有神圣的责任引导这些报纸走向一个强大的未来。我知道他不是这个意思，他也知道他不是这个意思，但他至少会走走过场。

但我低估了奥尔登的创始人对他们在新闻界的地位是多么的不在乎。对弗里曼来说，报纸是金融资产，仅此而已--在电子表格上重新排列的数字，直到它们为投资者带来最大的回报。对于棕榈滩的保守派和特朗普的盟友史密斯来说，与主流媒体作对实际上可能是奥尔登战略的一个好处。这两个人都不会成为保护记者委员会年度晚宴的嘉宾，而这对他们来说可能是好事。无论如何，很难想象他们会出现。

在《巴尔的摩太阳报》被奥尔登收购大约一个月后，该报的一位高级编辑在Zoom上接受了焦急的记者的提问。新老板宣布了一轮收购，一些受人爱戴的员工离开了，而那些留下来的人则对未来感到担忧。当一位记者问及他们的工作是否仍然受到重视时，这位编辑听起来很泄气。他说，他仍然欣赏他们的新闻工作，但他不能为他的公司老板说话。

"根据《大西洋月刊》获得的会议录音，这位编辑说："现在拥有我们的这家公司似乎仍然很--我甚至不知道该怎么说。"我们没有他们的消息......。他们就像无名的、不露面的人。"

在随后的几个月里，《太阳报》并没有像其他报纸那样立即经历深度裁员。记者们继续报道，编辑们继续编辑，工会也继续寻找方法给奥尔登施加压力。但工作中弥漫着一种宿命论的感觉。"帮助发起 "拯救我们的太阳 "运动的记者莉莉安-里德（Lillian Reed）告诉我："感觉我们现在正在与资本主义作斗争。"在美国，我将赢得对资本主义的斗争吗？可能不会。"

对大卫-西蒙来说，《巴尔的摩太阳报》呜咽的结局让人感觉不可避免，也令人愤怒。西蒙是《太阳报》的前记者，他在警察部门的工作使他在HBO电视台创作了《窃听风云》，他告诉我，该报在一系列失误的企业主手下受苦多年--像奥尔登这样冷血的企业最终让它脱离苦海只是时间问题而已。

大卫-西蒙告诉我，"现在坏事做得太多了，""当你找到它的时候，机构已经无法挽回了，或者该死的接近了。"
与《太阳报》的许多校友一样，西蒙沉浸在该报的历史中。他能举出几十年前的独家新闻，并告诉你它们惹到了谁。他引用了该报20世纪的专栏作家门肯（H. L. Mencken）关于新闻工作的乐趣的话：这确实是国王的生活。在《太阳报》的高峰期，它雇用了400多名记者，在伦敦、东京和耶路撒冷都有记者。它的二战记者为美国读者带来了纳粹集中营的第一手消息；它的社论版对马里兰州的政治生涯具有决定性作用。

但对西蒙来说，那份报纸完全存在于过去。随着奥尔登的控制，他认为《太阳报》"现在是一个囚犯"，几乎没有机会逃脱。他最关心的是，如果没有一份强有力的报纸来监视负责人，他的城市将如何管理。他告诉我，"地方新闻业死亡的实际效果是，你会得到我们所拥有的东西，"他说，"这是一个腐败和管理不善的光辉时代，基本上是错误的统治。"

西蒙给我打电话时，他正在拍摄他的新迷你剧《我们拥有这个城市》，该剧讲述了巴尔的摩警察多年来在警察部门内部经营自己的毒品团伙的真实故事。当联邦调查局在2017年抓到他们时，这个阴谋已经导致了一个平民的死亡和一连串的错误逮捕和定罪。该节目取材于《太阳报》记者写的一本书，西蒙很快指出，该报仍有优秀的记者报道重要的故事。但他不禁感到，如果《太阳报》全力运作，警察的丑闻会更早地被曝光。

他告诉我，巴尔的摩一直都有它的问题。"但是，如果你真的开始以宏大和好战的方式搞事，如果你开始偷窃、偷渡和撒谎，最终会有人在你背后说，'你在偷渡，你在撒谎'......他们会把它写进报纸。"

"现在坏事做得太久了，"他继续说，"当你发现的时候，机构已经无法挽回了，或者是该死的接近。"

带走了挤满爱管闲事的记者的新闻室，一个城市就失去了一个关键的责任层。接下来会发生什么？除非《论坛报》的轨迹发生变化，否则芝加哥可能很快就会提供一个严峻的案例研究。西蒙告诉我，巴尔的摩要避免类似的命运，就必须有新的东西出现--《太阳报》的精神继承者。"一份报纸就是它的内容和制作它的人。它不是名字或旗帜"。

他可能会实现他的愿望。斯图尔特-贝纳姆（Stewart Bainum）在竞购《太阳报》失败后，一直在悄悄地进行新的投资。他确信《太阳报》无法提供本市所需的报道，因此着手从头开始建立一个新的记录性出版物。最近几个月，他一直在与全国各地的地方新闻创业公司的领导人会面--《德克萨斯论坛报》、《孟菲斯日报》、纽约的《城市》--并收集最佳做法。他告诉我，他对他们的新闻工作印象深刻，但他最清楚的收获是，他们的资金还不够充足。要取代像《太阳报》这样的报纸，需要大量优秀的员工，不仅报道政府，还包括体育、学校、餐馆和艺术。"他告诉我："你需要真正的资本来推动工作。否则，"你就只是在海里撒尿"。

明年，贝努姆将推出《巴尔的摩旗帜》（The Baltimore Banner），一个全数字的非营利性新闻机构。他告诉我，一开始它的年度运营预算为1500万美元，对这种机构来说是前所未有的。它最初将依靠慈善捐款，但他的目标是在五年内出售足够的订阅，使其能够自给自足。他敏锐地意识到了风险--"我可能最终会鸡蛋碰石头，"他说，但他认为值得尝试开发一个可以在其他市场复制的成功模式。"他说："在我看来，没有什么行业比地方新闻业对一个有效的民主制度更不可或缺。

旗帜报》将推出约50名记者--与《太阳报》的规模相差无几--以及一项雄心勃勃的任务。他正在考虑的一个口号是 "马里兰最好的新闻室"。

当我半开玩笑地问道，他是否打算搜刮《太阳报》的人员时，他低声笑着回答。"嗯，"他告诉我，"他们有一些非常好的记者。"

这篇文章出现在2021年11月的印刷版上，标题是 "正在杀死美国报纸的人"。

麦凯-科普斯是《大西洋月刊》的一名工作人员。