[HN Gopher] Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund gutti...
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Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund gutting newsrooms
Author : Tycho
Score : 126 points
Date : 2021-10-14 15:17 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| WalterBright wrote:
| One model that counter-intuitively may work is the Open Source
| model. For example, I'm the CEO of the D Language Foundation. I
| take no salary from it. Sometimes I'll get a paid gig for things
| like training or a special project.
|
| Most contributors are in the same situation.
|
| We do have corporate contributors. Their help enables us to have
| a staff of paid people, and defrays other costs like cloud fees.
|
| The web site has some affiliate Amazon ads for programming books
| and D swag, and we acknowledge our sponsors, but we don't have
| paid advertisers.
|
| The software we make does not present any ads or do any telemetry
| of any sort.
|
| And yet it all works, and has been for 20 years now. Simply
| because we like what we do for its own sake.
|
| Consider that for anyone wanting to start such a thing for local
| news, the barriers to entry are really, really low.
| dralley wrote:
| >Consider that for anyone wanting to start such a thing for
| local news, the barriers to entry are really, really low.
|
| You're effectively talking about blogs, "twitter journalism"
| and freelance journalism of the type you might see from Forbes.
| It is, by and large, crap and incomparable to the kind of
| journalism that dedicated professionals used to provide before
| cable TV ratings and algorithms destroyed the incentives.
| WalterBright wrote:
| By and large, most open source attempts at programming
| languages are crap.
|
| But a handful are very professional.
|
| Other very successful similar initiatives are wikipedia and
| stackexchange.
| dralley wrote:
| There's still several big differences. It's not so
| difficult to filter out good programming languages from
| poor ones - the barrier to entry is still fairly high on
| both sides of the equation (production and adoption) and
| thus quantity of new languages is low. Even creating a bad
| programming language requires a certain degree of skill.
| Further, programmers have a much higher qualification to
| judge programming languages than the average person has to
| judge the quality of their news, which could span every
| possible topic. [0] And lastly bad amateurish programming
| languages can be ignored. They have little consequence on
| the whole of society.
|
| None of this is true for poor quality or fabricated news.
| It's easy to produce [1] and trivial to consume and share
| and thus it is _everywhere_ , it encompasses every subject
| matter and thus nobody is well-qualified to judge a
| significant fraction of it, and the desire to believe in
| fabrications that align with one's own beliefs is wildly
| stronger than the desire to strongly commit to learning a
| new programming language.
|
| [0] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-
| amnesia/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It is, by and large, crap and incomparable to the kind of
| journalism that dedicated professionals used to provide
| before cable TV ratings and algorithms destroyed the
| incentives.
|
| Print media consolidation and cost-cutting did that before
| cable news rose to prominence (people were complaining about
| it at least as far back as the 1980s), much less online media
| and its algorithms (which, anyway, optimize for exactly the
| same thing ad-supported media has always optimized for.)
| tlb wrote:
| Wikipedia makes a good open-source replacement for geopolitical
| news, just a little behind.
|
| For example,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
| gives a much clearer picture of what happened than all the
| newspaper coverage over the last 20 years.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| It's really, really tough to do that for news.
|
| Journalism has a very short shelf life, and can be costly to
| produce. Remember, what you read as a consumer is only the end
| product, there were a lot of calls, interviews, etc -- and
| those can be costly. You could have a reporter sitting at a
| city council meeting, for example, for four hours - -and have
| nothing of value to publish. Or a ton. You don't know.
|
| Beyond that, corporate contributors end up looking more like
| NPR than open source -- while a company might be based entirely
| around a DLang codebase, that doesnt really happen with news.
| So there are underwriters, but it looks more like either
| donations or advertisements.
| WalterBright wrote:
| In the 80s it was well known that an open source language
| project could never work.
| fouric wrote:
| "Some skeptics said that this other, completely unrelated
| kind of project couldn't be funded using this model several
| decades ago, and they were wrong." isn't a compelling
| argument.
|
| The GP post actually pointed out several differences
| between journalism and programming language development,
| and they seem pretty important to me - so unless you
| actually address those points, it seems safe to assume that
| you're comparing apples to oranges.
| xrd wrote:
| It is so crazy to me that Americans seem like the most patriotic
| people on the planet (but I'm American, so maybe I am missing
| things) BUT...
|
| ... given the choice of buying something local or from Amazon
| (that comes from China) if it costs $1 less, Americans will
| almost always go for the Chinese merchandise, or shop at Walmart
| to save a few bucks.
|
| .. given a choice between news that is written by locals, or a
| newspaper as described in the article, where they outsource the
| design work to the Phillipines, at least a large percentage of
| Americans will simply go with the better designed one, and never
| question the messenger.
|
| Americans are a very confused tribe, in my opinion, and I say
| that as one of them.
| pphysch wrote:
| Americanism is liberalism in the classical (Lockean) sense:
| individualism above all. This trumps our sense of
| patriotism/tribalism/nationalism/collectivism at almost every
| turn.
|
| In America, individual opinions are sacred proof of mind and
| soul. Being part of an intellectual consensus is frowned upon,
| because it suggests you aren't thinking for yourself.
| _Americans do not value consensus_ , and in fact tend to value
| discord and disagreement--because it implies the existence of
| multiple differentiated individual opinions. That's why
| everything is polarized. It's a feature, not a bug.
|
| It's easy to observe: most "Republican" voters aren't really
| enthusiastic members of the GOP, they just hate the Blue
| politicians more than the Red politicians. Likewise for the
| Democratic Party towards the GOP. "Red" voters are actually
| "not-Blue" voters.
|
| So of course Americans will buy the cheap imported product.
| It's in their individual microeconomic interest, and that
| matters far more than any political or national interest.
|
| My point is that reducing American cultural discontent to
| "tribalism" disguises the fact that Americans are perhaps the
| least collective-minded population on the planet.
| rackjack wrote:
| ... and "Blue" voters are actually "not-Red" voters!
| Interesting perspective, thank you for sharing.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Americans will almost always go for the Chinese merchandise,
| or shop at Walmart to save a few bucks.
|
| For a majority of Americans, saving "a few bucks" makes a huge
| difference - that could be the difference between being able to
| buy $5 worth of gas they need to go to their next shift[1].
|
| If you don't mind me asking - how much money (ballpark) can you
| spend on an impulse purchase? For some its single digit
| dollars, others tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars. When
| there's a difference of 3 magnitudes or order between people,
| the other's purchasing habits can seem alien (in both
| directions).
|
| Unbridled capitalism doesn't inherently optimize for the long-
| term stability of the entire system - instead, it is mostly a
| bunch of local maximums.
|
| 1. I never pass up the opportunity to link to Scalzi's timeless
| essay on "Being Poor"
| https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
| Tycho wrote:
| Are you sure about that? That the _majority_ of Americans are
| in a position where a few dollars makes a huge difference to
| their day? I'd be surprised.
| [deleted]
| btheshoe wrote:
| Part of this is because America is like three or four different
| countries compressed into a single uncohesive whole
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| As a foreigner, who has lived in the US for ~9 years, I can say
| that I mostly admire the "sane" patriotic spirit that most
| Americans have ("not sane" would be the racist, xenophobic
| type, which I instead condemn).
|
| Your points about where money is spent still stands; but I
| don't think it makes Americans less patriotic.
|
| You might also be true that they are "a very confused tribe",
| but rest assured that most people in the world think the same
| about their people.
| xrd wrote:
| That's reassuring to know we are all nuts! Thanks for that.
| ;)
| snarf21 wrote:
| Yeah, everyone wants dollar stores but forgets that they only
| exist because of exploiting foreign labor. If we made the same
| garbage here, it would cost a lot lot more. And eventually,
| this will be done via automation and the jobs will disappear
| over there too.
|
| We don't like to think about how other people are treated and
| have somehow convinced ourselves that we _deserve_ to be
| treated better because they "don't have to do the crappy job".
| And this isn't just overseas. Look at the Nabisco and Kellogg
| strikes; I didn't see mass protesting going viral online and
| people refusing to buy those products. I'm sure people who know
| someone directly affected were more likely to boycott. It is
| sad that we are such a selfish species and have completely lost
| all empathy.
| kwere wrote:
| >And eventually, this will be done via automation and the
| jobs will disappear over there too.
|
| so? capacity production and machinerized wealth will be local
| and accessible from society as whole
| jcfrei wrote:
| Looks like Alden is a fund that just capitalizes on the fact that
| people are very slow in cancelling their subscriptions. It's
| nothing to be proud of and fittingly their website doesn't
| provide you with any information about the fund or the team. But
| ultimately they just accelerate an inevitable change in the
| business model of journalism.
| drewda wrote:
| At many of these papers, advertising is the greater source of
| revenue than subscriptions.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| But advertising only sells when you've got subscribers.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| You could tell a similar story about vulture capital in many
| other industries. So it makes me wonder: what value to society do
| these practices provide? Would there be any great loss in making
| these sorts of actions illegal? (Of course, good luck
| distinguishing between genuine attempts to save failing
| businesses and vultures...)
| hnuser847 wrote:
| They buy failing businesses and try to stabilize them, just
| like iHeartRadio is going around and buying local radio
| stations. These are dead-end businesses that would have failed
| anyways.
| paul_f wrote:
| The goal is not to shut them down. The goal is to make the
| papers profitable and maintain that for as long as possible.
| Seems to me they are doing a good thing
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| Yeah I'm deeply tired of every single human endeavor's
| existence being solely judged on its ability to provide returns
| to shareholders. Wish we could just nationalize stuff that
| people like which doesn't generate profit. I sort of used to
| think that was the point of the state but I live in the US
| where the government is just a entity to provide contracts to
| corporations.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| What value to the ecology are the practices of literal
| vultures?
|
| They eat the dead and moribund
| zz865 wrote:
| I think the point is these media companies are near-worthless,
| if vulture funds didn't buy them no one else would and they'd
| just fold.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| Shareholder returns aren't the only value these organizations
| can provide.
| human_person wrote:
| What do you mean by 'near-worthless'? A small radio station
| that provides connection, information and entertainment to a
| rural area and a handful of jobs for community members might
| be "worthless" in the sense that it wont create massive
| returns for an investor but that doesnt make it worthless to
| the community it is a part of.
|
| The problem is these vultures come in make false promises
| about supporting the station and then suck it dry. In the end
| the vultures walk away with a tidy profit and the community
| is worse off.
|
| Just because we cant quantify the value of something in terms
| of hard currency doesnt make it worthless.
| zz865 wrote:
| Yeah I mean economically worthless, not socially useful.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| I believe that by "near-worthless" they mean that a given
| company is hemorrhaging assets and basically about to fold.
| A business that continuously runs net negative has to close
| at some point without an external influx of capital, after
| all.
|
| The alleged theory goes that since without the help of some
| fund such a company is going to fold anyways, the fund
| can't really do much worse than the alternative, so might
| as well let them have a shot at repairing the business and
| rescuing it. Sometimes they're successful, sometimes
| they're not.
| cageface wrote:
| I normally refrain from making meta comments about site
| implementations but this site doesn't scroll _at all_ in Safari.
|
| There needs to be a hippocratic oath of web development.
| runako wrote:
| Do you have a content blocker or other plugin? It scrolls in my
| Safari fine (Mac, Big Sur).
| cageface wrote:
| Yeah it works in an incognito window. I've never seen a site
| that completely breaks scrolling with a content blocker
| installed before.
| kwere wrote:
| classic bug into feature
| stordoff wrote:
| I've seen it happen once or twice in Chrome. IIRC, it was
| when an overlay element (newsletter or paywall prompt) was
| removed, but an invisible <div> that blocked scrolling was
| left behind (it would usually be removed when the prompt
| was dismissed).
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| I find this pretty frequently (a few times a day) with
| GDPR cookie consent modals.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| If any newsroom brass is reading this (or independent reporters,
| especially local) -- I'd love to talk. We're building a platform
| to help monetize journalism outside of the usual predatory social
| media/aggregator set up.
|
| jared (at) nillium (dot) com
| 1cvmask wrote:
| How will it differ to Substack?
| jaredwiener wrote:
| Substack is great for people who already have an audience, or
| when you write analysis or opinion; it doesn't really work
| for a team of people covering hard/spot news. It also isn't
| real time -- so it doesn't really work to cover things _as
| they are happening._
|
| We're building a network of local journalists, along with
| others in national verticals. The incentive structure exists
| in a way to promote news people want to come back to read,
| not clickbait headlines, divisive or anger driving hot takes,
| or lowest common denominator coverage. All geared to 18-34
| year olds, who are less likely to consume local news in the
| traditional forms, like subscribing to a local paper or
| watching broadcast TV.
| zx76 wrote:
| This sounds like an interesting idea. I know quite a few
| people who are non-tech folk in this 18 - 34 demographic
| like me and their idea of "news" is more the Morning Brew
| newsletter than CNN.
| exolymph wrote:
| Counterpoint, "Judd Legum proved that investigative
| journalism can thrive on Substack":
| https://simonowens.substack.com/p/judd-legum-proved-that-
| inv...
| jaredwiener wrote:
| Yes, he has done a really great job with Popular
| Information.
|
| Still -- a few fine points on this:
|
| - He's covering topics of national interest, which is
| very different than local when it comes to subscription
| numbers.
|
| - To that point, "Twitter continues to be the biggest
| driver of newsletter signups." We've seen that it can be
| _incredibly_ difficult for local news to trend on social
| media, namely because -- by definition -- it appeals to a
| limited audience.
|
| - By being investigative only, it means he can choose
| what he is willing to cover. Investigative reporting is
| incredibly important, but it can be very different than
| replacing local newspapers -- while they can do
| investigative pieces as well, so much of what they do is
| covering the events around their coverage area. That
| takes a team of people, because you cannot be everywhere
| at once.
|
| - He has a big name. True, he might not have been famous
| when he started, but the article itself points out that
| he was able to gain coverage in Wired because what he was
| doing was such a novelty. Now, the headline of the
| Substack you linked to doesn't even need to include the
| name of his newsletter, his own name is so well known.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| How are you going to reconcile "promoting news people want
| to come back to read" and doing things in real time? One
| major problem with the news industry is that they are
| incentivized to be first instead of correct.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| (edit -- deleting earlier comment and moving here as a
| reply.)
|
| This is one of the reasons we're really focusing on local
| first -- unless you're in a handful of American cities
| that still has a thriving local press corps, the question
| isn't really who is first, it's who is covering it at
| all.
|
| Beyond that, we're trying to move away from the
| traditional formats that somehow migrated from the print
| and broadcast worlds online. When you write an article,
| you have to have all of the information together at once;
| of course, that's rarely how the reporting process works.
| By posting it as reporters get information, and as
| they're comfortable reporting that information -- it not
| only can get to the consumer quickly, but we hope it can
| also eliminate some of the mystery behind why a
| journalist is reporting what they are reporting.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Sounds like Blendle. I hope you have better luck than
| they did - their business always seemed rather hopeless.
| ghaff wrote:
| >the question isn't really who is first, it's who is
| covering it at all
|
| As you get to smaller cities and even towns, I'd argue
| that weekly is probably fine for frequency and allows for
| coverage of what is actually important. Of course, online
| extras could cover more urgent things.
|
| The overall economics are still an issue of course, but
| do people really need most local news RIGHT NOW? Of
| course, there was a point in my life when most of the
| news I consumed came from reading Time Magazine every
| week.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| The urgency question is a big deal. Of course, some
| things theres a resounding yes -- the path of a tornado,
| for example, or even to know about a community board
| hearing about something you may feel strongly about.
|
| But then of course, theres the other stuff. Stuff that
| you might want to know about over the course of the week.
| The great part of the Internet now is that there doesn't
| really have to be any delineation between the two; we
| don't have to go to press. We can post what we need to
| when we need to, and of course push notifications/etc for
| the really urgent stuff.
| [deleted]
| floatingatoll wrote:
| In one sentence, what is your primary source of revenue
| expected to be (aside from VC funding if any)?
|
| Do you intend to sell or operate personalized advertisements?
|
| Do you intend to sell anonymized (or not) customer data as a
| revenue source?
| jaredwiener wrote:
| > In one sentence, what is your primary source of revenue
| expected to be (aside from VC funding if any)?
|
| Freemium model: advertisement based, with a subscription fee
| for some extra content personalization.
|
| > Do you intend to sell or operate personalized
| advertisements?
|
| Not "personalized" the way that you are intending. At the
| moment we do fall back to programmatic bidding ads like AdMob
| by default, but the general idea is local based ads. Since
| its local news, and we know your locale, we sell to local
| businesses -- it's essentially the same "targeting" that your
| local newspaper has been doing for the last 100 years.
|
| > Do you intend to sell anonymized (or not) customer data as
| a revenue source?
|
| No.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Excellent!
| wanderingmind wrote:
| I think this deserves a separate Show HN post.
| slownews45 wrote:
| I don't think anything is that secret about their business model.
| You see this same model with legacy enterprise software and other
| long tail recurring revenue soures. You largely give up on
| growth, but drop costs to near zero if you can and buyout based
| on the tail that will stick for a while.
|
| There are often hyperbolic claims that these local newsrooms
| would be making tons of money if only an investor came in who
| understood business - but the newsrooms never seem able to find
| that investor. Employee buyout efforts also have fallen flat,
| efforts which are driven by I think very clear views on what
| Alden will do (cut costs!).
|
| Separately, not all news has fallen - Wall Street Journal has to
| be making good money off their subscription and print product,
| they've taken a bit more of a middle of the road path relative to
| other media. NY Times and Washington Post also probably doing OK
| for various reasons.
|
| There is a real need for local news however, desperate, and
| ideally not the hard left / right type stuff that seems to emerge
| on social media.
| joelthelion wrote:
| > I don't think anything is that secret about their business
| model. You see this same model with legacy enterprise software
| and other long tail recurring revenue soures. You largely give
| up on growth, but drop costs to near zero if you can and buyout
| based on the tail that will stick for a while.
|
| Just because it's common doesn't mean it's OK. You destroy
| sometimes perfectly viable businesses and abuse their loyal
| customers, just for a quick buck.
| xxpor wrote:
| It was always inevitable that the largest newspapers would be
| the winners in a world with the internet.
|
| The only thing that propped up local newspapers was the
| monopoly they had on local distribution (for readers) and
| therefore eyeballs (for advertisers). The internet completely
| breaks that.
|
| The unfortunate part is that the monopoly did pay for actual
| local reporting. But the ad supported business model for
| reports from city hall just isn't there any more in smaller
| cities.
| ghaff wrote:
| And as you got into even smaller markets, local newspapers
| and reporting was always a shaky business. My town had a
| rather good local paper for a number of years but it was
| pretty much a labor of love and the publisher became ill and
| it shut down. Now, it's hard to find out about just about
| anything going on in town outside of Facebook and Nextdoor.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _You see this same model with legacy enterprise software and
| other long tail recurring revenue soures. You largely give up
| on growth, but drop costs to near zero if you can and buyout
| based on the tail that will stick for a while._
|
| Sure, it's a dynamic that makes a whole bunch of things
| terrible. Local news indeed has lost money-making potential and
| this approach makes sense economically. But the dynamic you
| describe essentially "zombifies" a whole bunch of enterprises,
| which in turn makes them fragile and we can see the results
| today.
|
| And yeah, it's not shortsightedness on the part of a single
| investor, it's shortsightedness on the part of this society.
| wahern wrote:
| The NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have all
| adopted partisan baiting techniques to draw in subscribers.
| (IMO, they've done so in that order, with Washington Post the
| most extreme, and NY Times bringing up the rear but quickly
| closing the gap as they've cycled out their older reporters
| with younger ones the past few years.) Their actual news
| reporting has suffered considerably, though they're such large
| organizations with enough veteran journalists that they do
| still put out some good pieces somewhat regularly, especially
| relative to newer media and smaller media.
| slownews45 wrote:
| As a long time reader of all three I don't disagree. I did
| think the NY Times and WaPo were pretty much equal in the
| kind of partisan baiting stuff (note I'm a dem donor but
| tired a bit of the sometimes comically bad "news" slants).
| Even though I'm left on the issues I've been enjoying WSJ
| though I skip opinion section / a bit less raw clickbait type
| writing. Still vote for the left - but I think it probably
| could use a somewhat mellower set of media bubbles - but
| maybe the market is just not there anymore.
| alecb wrote:
| WSJ's reporting is very good but their editorial board is
| maybe the most off-kilter in the entire industry; like
| 1/3rd of their op-eds are asking why the Supreme Court
| won't take up a case to allow employers to bring whips to
| the office.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| You're mistaken if you think this is new. Just the other day
| I was reading an old NYT piece suggesting Thomas Edison be
| hanged for inventing too many things (such as a sound
| amplification device which they imagined would be in common
| use on the street and in restaurants.)
| wahern wrote:
| Of course it's not new. But it's not consistent across
| time, either, and the prevalence of more substantive
| journalism has waxed and waned. Mid-to-late century America
| was a peculiar period, especially for journalism. It had
| plenty of biases, but it also had some unique qualities
| that should teach us what is _possible_ , and unfortunately
| many of those good qualities have been eroded and discarded
| altogether, for myriad reasons.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I used to buy ads on denverpost.com before Alden bought them.
|
| Then the site because the largest piece of hot garbage ever.
|
| I don't know who in the world would pay for ads on there anymore.
| any visitors they do have probably wouldn't even see your ad
| since there are like 4 layers of ads on top of each other, with
| multiple embedded auto play videos and outstream ads blowing up
| my laptop fan. PLUS they even fire inline ads on paywall
| impressions which makes them un viewable!
|
| Basically the opposite digital media approach as NyTimes and
| others who focus on high quality impressions and subscriber
| revenue. But people are still paying for impressions so I guess
| it works.
|
| * I personally like the Axios model of a high quality ad for high
| quality audience + they are trying to sell their own software for
| additional revenue.
| sneilan1 wrote:
| Does anyone have a TLDR? I love the Atlantic but they assume I
| have more time than I do.
| nverno wrote:
| It's a smear piece. There may be some truth to the
| characterization of people behind the firm, but as a reader
| it's impossible to know given the animosity of the writers
| towards their subjects.
|
| They claim the vulture capitalists are destroying local news
| for the sake of profits, while the vultures claim they buy
| businesses on the brink of destruction and attempt to update
| their business models/salvage something. The article doesn't
| delve into the actual economics of any of it, however.
| jessaustin wrote:
| If only the victim of this smear had some sort of popular
| media access...
| [deleted]
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Alden buys newspapers, jacks up the subscriptions prices,
| slowly cuts staff and other costs, and milks the profits as
| long as possible. Classic corporate raider playbook.
| [deleted]
| Tycho wrote:
| This hedge fund is the second biggest newspaper owner in the
| country but the founders supposedly rarely show their faces in
| any newsroom, make no public statements, and one of them hasn't
| even been photographed since the 80s. There's also an
| implication that they are deliberately destroying the papers
| for the sake of short term profit, but the business details are
| a bit sketchy.
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