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Hedge funds scoop up local newspapers withering under COVID-19 cuts
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Hedge funds scoop up local newspapers withering under COVID-19 cuts

Over the past few years, the newspaper industry has been slowly acquired by deep-pocketed financial companies that believe they can cut costs, shift to digital distribution and create better returns. Now, as coronavirus-induced layoffs mount at local newspapers, journalists and industry observers fear that the pandemic could pave the way for further consolidation.

Hedge funds scoop up local newspapers withering under COVID-19 cuts

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A Media Critic Focuses on the Crisis in Local News
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A Media Critic Focuses on the Crisis in Local News

Hedge-fund ownership is one of, if not the, worst developments that have occurred for newspapers. These companies don’t care about journalism. They care about strip-mining what’s left for whatever profits can be squeezed, not with an eye to a sustainable future but with an eye toward next quarter’s balance sheet.

A Media Critic Focuses on the Crisis in Local News

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Bankrupt newspapers receive some unexpected support - too late?
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Bankrupt newspapers receive some unexpected support - too late?

Newspapers and mayors aren’t always friendly. If journalists aren’t prying into the inner workings of City Hall, they aren’t doing their jobs. Tension needn’t breed animosity, though, and a couple of big-city mayors went to bat for their local newspapers last month.

Bankrupt newspapers receive some unexpected support - too late?

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Save Our Sun Becomes Save Our Newspapers
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Save Our Sun Becomes Save Our Newspapers

“One of the biggest problems we have in journalism right now, is hedge funds are bleeding newsrooms dry,” said Jon Schleuss, president of the News Guild International, the union that represents reporters at The Sun and other papers. The funds treat “newspapers and news publications as distressed assets,” he said.

Save Our Sun Becomes Save Our Newspapers

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The Constitution Doesn’t Work Without Local News
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The Constitution Doesn’t Work Without Local News

The local-news losses are startling: As I write in my new book, Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, in the past 15 years, more than 2,100 local newspapers have gone out of business, according to the journalism scholar Penny Muse Abernathy at the University of North Carolina.

The Constitution Doesn’t Work Without Local News

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Media critic Margaret Sullivan outlines the mounting crisis for local journalism
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Media critic Margaret Sullivan outlines the mounting crisis for local journalism

We media people know all too well that many local news sources are deeply troubled, financially, but most Americans do not know. And most Americans aren’t accustomed to paying for local news. So that’s a real problem to be overcome.

Media critic Margaret Sullivan outlines the mounting crisis for local journalism