In a blast from the past journalists at The Chicago Tribune and The New York Daily News are speaking with one voice, imploring anyone with big pockets to save them.
Running out of time and hope, more than 100 Chicago Tribune employees and supporters held a rally at the newspaper’s West Town printing plant Saturday evening in a last-ditch effort to prevent the sale of Tribune Publishing to hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
and
DAILY NEWS NEEDS NEW OWNER.
And not just any owner: a New York owner, someone who knows the city and embraces the paper’s 102-year legacy, who hears the voices of the five boroughs shouting from every page and our website. Someone who can treat the newspaper as a public trust, not simply as a property from which to squeeze every last bit of possible profit.
Earlier this month The New York Daily News warned of dire consequences:
The News’ current owners, Tribune Publishing, fired half the newsroom on a single morning in 2018. Though everyone at this paper has done their best to rebound, and I’m proud of so much we do every day, we are in many ways still reeling.
Tribune now plans to peddle the paper to Alden Global Capital, the notorious hedge fund known for decimating newspapers like the Denver Post before picking the bones for profit.
This weekend Chicago Tribune workers are just as nervous about Alden:
The message to Tribune Publishing shareholders, who are set to vote Friday on Alden’s proposed $633 million bid to buy the Chicago-based newspaper chain, could be winnowed down to an oft-repeated chant: “Vote no.”
“We are here because we want to save the Chicago Tribune,” Gregory Pratt, a Tribune reporter and president of the Chicago Tribune Guild, told the crowd. “In six days, Tribune Publishing shareholders will vote on whether to accept an offer from a company that will destroy our newspaper.”
