On a cold Chicago morning last month, Gary Marx, a veteran investigative reporter, took his dog for a walk and then strolled over to the affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood. After being buzzed into the courtyard of a large house, he hand-delivered a letter urging the intended recipient to buy — or at least invest in — Mr. Marx’s journalistic home of more than three decades, The Chicago Tribune.
“It’s one thing to put your name on a museum,” Mr. Marx said, summarizing the contents of the letter in an interview, “but this is to save an institution that really safeguards this city.”
Along with a Tribune colleague, the investigative reporter David Jackson, Mr. Marx undertook his unorthodox campaign after it was disclosed in November that Alden Global Capital, a New York hedge fund, had acquired a large stake in Tribune Publishing, the parent company of Chicago’s biggest daily.
Journalists are wary of Alden because of its cut-to-the-bone management strategy. In 2018, a group of writers and editors at the Alden-owned Denver Post published a special package devoted to attacking the company, which had enacted deep staff cuts at the paper. The lead article blasted Alden executives as “vulture capitalists.”
In addition to sending letters to wealthy Chicagoans, Mr. Marx and Mr. Jackson have written to Alden’s president, Heath Freeman, asking him for a meeting. They have received no response. Mr. Freeman and MediaNews Group, the Alden subsidiary that runs its newspaper operation, did not reply to requests for comment for this article.
The two reporters have also made an appeal to Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire medical industry entrepreneur who bought The Los Angeles Times and other California papers from Tribune Publishing in 2018 for $500 million after prolonged tensions between The Times’s editorial staff and Tribune executives.
Dr. Soon-Shiong, a Tribune Publishing stakeholder since 2016, has held on to 25 percent of the company. Mr. Marx and Mr. Jackson asked that he keep his interest in Tribune Publishing or sell it to civic-minded investors, rather than allowing it to end up with Alden.
“Your role as the news company’s savior could only add to your reputation and opportunities,” they wrote.
Their attempts to woo new investors are unusual in an industry that has traditionally tried to keep business and journalism separate.
“It was not that long ago that it would have been unusual to publicly campaign for a change of ownership,” Ann Marie Lipinski, a former Chicago Tribune editor in chief and the curator of Harvard’s Nieman Center for Journalism, said in an interview. “What you’re seeing in Chicago is a very different approach: journalists dissatisfied with leaving business decisions to the business side, trying to have significant impact on the future of their companies.”
Mr. Marx, who was once expelled from Cuba because of his reporting, and Mr. Jackson, who won a Pulitzer Prize during a one-year stint at The Washington Post for his articles on victims of police shootings, have relied on habits honed in the newsroom as they make the rounds.
Before ending a conversation with a possible benefactor, for instance, they ask that person whom they should contact next. They also published an opinion article in The New York Times calling attention to what they see as the threat to journalism posed by Alden.
After having bought up roughly 32 percent of Tribune Publishing in recent years, Alden is the company’s largest shareholder. It can buy more Tribune Publishing stock as soon as July. This month, the company asked journalists at newspapers across the country to volunteer for buyouts.
It is certainly not news that the newspaper business is in trouble. Its onetime profit center, print advertising, has declined sharply as readers increasingly prefer to get the news on screens.
The finance industry, looking at newspapers as distressed assets with hidden value, has swooped in, scooping up struggling publications, cutting their staffs and wringing them for profits.
Last year, the parent company of the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, GateHouse Media, bought the second largest chain, Gannett, in a merger valued at $1.2 billion. That deal was also driven by the banking industry. The new company, named Gannett, is controlled by a private equity firm, Fortress Investment Group, which itself is owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. The merger also received nearly $2 billion in financing from another private equity firm, Apollo Global Management.
On the day the deal went through, the company’s leader, Michael E. Reed, spoke of “inefficiencies” at the new Gannett and described the NewsGuild, the union that represents journalists at many of its papers, as “a big problem.”
Like Mr. Marx and Mr. Jackson in Chicago, journalists in other cities have made moves to protect their jobs — by working to form unions, seeking out new ownership or generally raising a ruckus.
Journalists at The Baltimore Sun, a Tribune Publishing newspaper, have sought buyers among local entrepreneurs and foundations, said Scott Dance, a weather and environment reporter there. The prospects include the Abell Foundation — endowed by the namesake family that owned The Sun until its 1986 sale to Times Mirror, a newspaper company that merged with Tribune Publishing’s predecessor in 2000.
In Oakland last month, journalists at the Alden-owned Bay Area News Group, a ring of daily ad community papers that has lost nearly 100 jobs since 2016, leafleted a Christmas tree lighting, warning about “Alden Global Capital and the Destruction of Local News.”
“They clearly do not value the newspaper mission,” said George Kelly, a Bay Area News Group reporter. “We’ve been asking for Alden to invest or get out.”
Late last year, journalists at The Miami Herald and its Spanish-language sibling publication, El Nuevo Herald, won union recognition days after their owner, the publicly owned newspaper chain McClatchy, revealed that it might not be able to make an upcoming minimum payment to the company pension plan. A McClatchy spokeswoman declined to comment.
A union push followed extensive layoffs two years ago at The Los Angeles Times, job cuts that were presided over by Michael W. Ferro Jr., who was the chairman of Tribune Publishing (then known as Tronc). After he installed an editor and publisher who feuded with the staff, newsroom employees formed the paper’s first union since its founding in 1881. A few months later, Dr. Soon-Shiong took The Times off Tribune Publishing’s hands, to the newsroom’s relief.
“The Los Angeles Times campaign started because we had all this changing management and questions about ownership,” said Jon Schleuss, a former editor there who is the new president of NewsGuild, the union that represents journalists at many newspapers (including The New York Times).
“Without forming the union,” he added, “we would never have gotten the new owner.”
In 2018, Tribune Publishing cut the newsroom staff of The Daily News in New York in half. The layoffs at the formerly brawny tabloid, which once had the highest circulation of any daily newspaper in the country, came a year after Tribune Publishing bought it.
The reign of Mr. Ferro as the Tribune Publishing chairman was brief. It started in 2016 when his fund, Merrick Ventures, plowed $44 million into the company and came to an end in 2018, when he stepped down after two women accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. He sold his Tribune Publishing shares to Alden.
Other Tribune Publishing newspapers had organizing drives during his time in charge: The Hartford Courant, The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, The Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call and — for the first time in its more than 170 years — The Chicago Tribune formed unions. A Tribune Publishing spokesman declined to comment for this article.
Newsroom employees at The Arizona Republic, a daily belonging to the supersize version of Gannett that came into being after the merger with GateHouse Media, voted to become unionized in October. Steve Benson, a Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist who was laid off a year ago, designed a logo for the Arizona Republic Guild featuring a saguaro cactus with a No. 2 pencil in place of a trunk.
Maribel Wadsworth, the publisher of Gannett and USA Today, said in an interview that, as a former reporter, she sympathized with the journalists — “seeking that sense of security is an understandable path,” she said — but expressed skepticism about the organizing effort.
“Unions are not going to be the driver of revenue growth or subscription growth, or change the challenges the industry has faced,” she said.
Several Republic journalists said they hoped to achieve greater job security and opportunities for career advancement. They also sounded loftier aims that have been invoked in newsrooms across the country.
“The days of journalism being held publicly by Wall Street should be over,” said Rebekah L. Sanders, the consumer protection reporter at The Republic who helped lead the union drive. “We have a public service mission, which used to be propped up by crazy ad margins. That’s all gone, so we need to make a transition in our business model.”
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