Inside Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund that's gutting local newspapers across the country—and could be coming to your town next. My cover story for the November issue of @TheAtlantic: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
You probably feel like you already know why local news is dying. Craigslist killed the classifieds, Google/Facebook swallowed the ad market, and hapless newspapers failed to adapt to the internet. There's truth to all that—but the Alden story is different. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
Alden has figured out how to profit by driving its papers into the ground: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until readers bolt and the paper shrivels or folds. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
“They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think that’s honestly a misnomer," one former Chicago Tribune reporter told me. "A vulture doesn’t hold a wounded animal’s head underwater. This is predatory." theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
The men behind Alden are obsessively secretive. The firm's website contains no information beyond its name. One co-founder, Randall Smith, hasn't given an interview since the 1980s. Reporting on them was a deeply strange experience. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… 
Randall Smith, a pioneer of "vulture capitalism" in the 1980s, now owns multiple mansions in Palm Beach, where he is a major Trump donor. One of his earliest forays into the media sector was... revealing: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
According to the former executive, Heath Freeman, Alden's president, once suggested in a meeting that the firm's newspapers could get rid of all their full-time reporters and rely entirely on freelancers. (Freeman denied this through a spokesperson.) theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
I spoke to Freeman, and was struck by how little he seemed to care about Alden's journalistic reputation. At one point I asked him to name some recent stories from his papers that he especially liked (a softball!) and he declined to answer on the record. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
It's a cliche at this point, but after a decade of covering politics I'm more convinced than ever that killing off these papers has serious consequences. When a local paper vanishes, polarization increases, voter turnout drops, misinformation proliferates. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
“The practical effect of the death of local journalism is that you get what we’ve had, which is a halcyon time for corruption and mismanagement and basically misrule,” David Simon, the famous Baltimore Sun alum and creator of The Wire, told me. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
Some news: Next year, hotel magnate Stewart Bainum Jr. will launch a digital nonprofit news outlet, The Baltimore Banner, with a staff of 50 journalists and an annual operating budget of $15 million—a direct challenge to the Alden-owned Baltimore Sun. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
The last thing I'll say for now is that I'm grateful for all the time local reporters—both those who've left Alden-owned papers and those who are still there—gave me while I was working on this piece. They're doing important (and often thankless) work, and deserve a lot of credit
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