Alden is known for cutting costs and laying off journalists at the newspapers it owns. When it was making moves to acquire Tribune — a chain that includes The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The New York Daily News and The Hartford Courant among its nine major metropolitan dailies — journalists at Tribune papers across the country held protests. A few even tried to persuade would-be benefactors to buy Tribune papers and run them as public trusts.
Alden has said in its defense that it saves struggling newspapers from failing outright.
An alternate bid for Tribune, led by Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a Maryland hospitality executive, came and went earlier this year. In May, Tribune’s shareholders approved the Alden sale.
The acquisition made Alden the nation’s second largest newspaper publisher by circulation. (Gannett, the owner of USA Today, is the largest.) Before buying Tribune, the hedge fund was the owner of MediaNews Group, the publisher of some 200 newspapers.
Since the deal went through, the number of journalists at Tribune newspapers has fallen. Last month, 73 staff members across the company’s newspapers agreed to take buyouts, according to the NewsGuild, a journalists’ union. Additionally, an unknown number of nonunion employees took buyouts, the guild said.
It was the second round of buyouts in just 18 months, even as Tribune reported being profitable and had amassed $250 million in cash on its balance sheet.
“Folks who have been with us a long time, folks who are really well established in their beats, have left,” said Jen Sheehan, a reporter at The Morning Call, a Tribune paper in Allentown, Penn.
In the last three years, the number of unionized newsroom employees at The Morning Call fell to 25 from 55, according to the Guild. During the same period, the number of union journalists at The Chicago Tribune declined to 87 from 169. At The Hartford Courant, that number fell to 31 from 53.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
