How Soon Will the Union-Tribune Be Stripped Down and Sold for Parts?

An email about layoffs came 10 minutes after employees learned of the sale

On Monday afternoon we learned that Patrick Soon-Shiong and his family had sold the San Diego Union-Tribune to MediaNews Group.

His acquisition of our town’s daily newspaper five years ago was part of a package deal to acquire the Los Angeles Times. What followed was the best incarnation of the Union-Tribune I’ve seen in five decades of reading it.

While Soon-Shiong promised to do right by the UT, his heart just wasn’t in it. His pride and joy in Los Angeles was constantly undergoing internal turmoil and struggling with the bleak economic picture affecting print media in general. 

The good thing about his ownership was the freedom he gave the San Diego paper to explore new kinds of coverage and end its historic role as a bully pulpit for the wealthy. The paper was profitable and well-regarded in the community.

Those days are over. The sale was a surprise, even to management at the paper. And just to twist the knife, about 10 minutes after the sale was announced, staffers received an email informing them of not-far-in-the-future layoffs and buyouts. 

The UT’s new owners will chop it into parts, sell them, and leave the paper of record for the county as a smoldering mess.

Alden Global Capital, owned by Randall Smith, uses MediaNews Group to oversee roughly 200 newspapers in the United States, including The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News and The Denver Post. Only Gannett, which owns USA Today and other papers, operates more.

Alden is supposedly an investment company, but they don’t make a fuss about being called a "vulture hedge fund." It makes money with newspapers by driving them into the ground. Their aim is not to make them into long-term sustainable businesses but rather maximize profits quickly to show it has made a winning investment.

Their technique involves gutting the organization and being highly selective about paying bills. The company simply stops paying rent when it suits them.

Following their acquisition of the Tribune empire, newsrooms for The Allentown Morning Call, The Annapolis Capital Gazette, The Orlando Sentinel and The New York Daily News were forced to move due to unpaid rent.. Needless to say they all moved to smaller and chintzier quarters. The Chicago Tribune's newsroom was swapped out for a "Chipotle-sized office" near the printing press.

Here’s a snip from Nebraska Public Media as Alden attempted to acquire Lee Newspapers. In addition to the Omaha World Herald, Lee publishes 77 daily newspapers in 26 states, and more than 350 weekly, classified, and specialty publications. 

• For Omaha World-Herald News Guild President Todd Cooper, the news of Alden’s offer was devastating.

• “They (Alden) hide in the shadows but they’re the worst of newspaper owners,” he said. “They care about nothing but the bottom line and pounce on this notion that newspapers are dead or a dead medium — and that's just not true.”

• Cooper, who has worked as a courts reporter at the Omaha World-Herald for more than 24 years, said the paper’s union fears that if Alden buys Lee, the Herald and many of Nebraska’s other newspapers will be “stripped down” by staff cuts.

• “The fewer reporters you have, the fewer reporters you have to watch out for government waste and wrongdoing,” Cooper said. “It becomes this cycle and they lead newspapers to circle the drain until you’re only covering the bare minimum.”

In a city like San Diego where many deals involve sleight of hand, not having a strong daily will make room for bad people to be even worse.

The deal with the UT is reflective of how business gets done these days. the example most people are vaguely aware of involves hundreds of popular retail stores being bought out, having their assets sold, and then leveraged for loans until the business comes crashing down.

This story at the Atlantic describes the process in excruciating detail.

I’m gonna close out this post by reminding readers of the valuable reporting at Voice of San Diego. When the dust settles after the local daily is trashed, they’ll be an important resource for honest reporting. They deserve everybody’s support.

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Bad News for Humanity

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Oil companies are laughing while the world burns Via HEATED at Substack

• The evidence that climate change is not merely a phenomenon, but a crisis, a catastrophe, and a calamity, grows stronger every day. Only a few decades ago, no journalist would have dreamed of writing a sentence like, “The Earth is getting too hot for humans to survive.” But we not only write that sentence this week, we expect to write it in weeks to come.

• And it turns out, it bears repeating—because many in the mainstream media still aren’t connecting these extreme temperatures to climate change.

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Florida in hot water as ocean temperatures rise along with the humidity Via the Associated Press

• Record global ocean heating has invaded Florida with a vengeance.

• Water temperatures in the mid-90s are threatening delicate coral reefs, depriving swimmers of cooling dips and adding a bit more ick to the Sunshine State’s already oppressive summer weather. Forecasters are warning of temperatures that with humidity will feel like 110 degrees by week’s end.

• If that’s not enough, Florida is about to get a dose of dust from Africa’s Sahara Desert that’s likely to hurt air quality.

• The globe is coming off a week of heat not seen in modern measurements, the World Meteorological Organization said Monday, using data from Japan’s weather agency to confirm unofficial records reported nearly daily last week by the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. Japan reported the global average temperature on Friday was half a degree warmer than its past record hottest day in August 2016.

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Good to know: Kevin Faulconer Rises from the ashes. After getting whooped in a recall campaign for Governor, our former Mayor is launching a campaign for supervisor in San Diego's third district today. 

Incumbent Terra Lawson-Remer is part of the progressive voting block that’s making fundamental changes in how the County delivers services. I’m guessing the local bourgeoisie really wants “the good old days back” at the Supervisors.