Alden Global and the Tribune Papers: The 2021 Purchase, by the Numbers
How a Hedge Fund Beat a Hotel Magnate for One of America's Last Big Regional Chains
Tribune Tower, Chicago. Alden Global Capital completed its purchase of Tribune Publishing in 2021.
Photo: Chicago Tribune Tower Exterior 3 · Wikimedia Commons
Tribune Publishing entered 2021 as one of the few remaining large-scale regional newspaper groups in the United States — owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the New York Daily News, the Orlando Sentinel, and five other metro dailies. It exited that year as a private company wholly controlled by Alden Global Capital, the New York-based hedge fund already notorious for aggressive cost-cutting at its MediaNews Group and Digital First Media properties.
Alden held roughly 32 percent of Tribune Publishing's shares before making a formal takeover bid in February 2021, offering $14.25 per share — a figure that valued the company at approximately $630 million. The bid landed in a board already fractured over strategy, and it triggered an immediate counter-effort from Stewart Bainum, a Maryland hotel entrepreneur and longtime Baltimore Sun reader, who sought first to purchase the Sun alone and then, when that stalled, to mount a rival offer for the entire company. Bainum assembled a consortium that included Swiss philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss and initially proposed a competing bid in the range of $18.50 per share. That consortium ultimately failed to secure financing on the timeline required, and Bainum's effort collapsed in the spring of 2021.
The masthead stays on the door after the newsroom goes.
Photo: Ekaterina Belinskaya / Pexels
Tribune Publishing's shareholder vote in May 2021 returned a majority in favour of the Alden offer, which had been raised to $17.25 per share during negotiations. The deal closed in May 2021, taking Tribune Publishing private and removing it from Nasdaq. Alden's acquisition vehicle, New Media Investment Group — the same structure the firm had used in the GateHouse consolidation — was not involved; Tribune was absorbed directly into Alden's portfolio.
What the Titles Looked Like Before and After
The staffing trajectory at Tribune's papers had already been steep before Alden took formal control. The Chicago Tribune employed roughly 300 newsroom staff as recently as 2018; by the time the acquisition closed, that number had fallen below 200, according to union disclosures from the Chicago Tribune Guild. The Baltimore Sun newsroom, which had exceeded 400 journalists in the early 2000s, stood at fewer than 100 by 2021. Those declines predated Alden — Tribune had itself imposed multiple rounds of buyouts — but the pace accelerated under new ownership.
In the months after closing, Alden moved quickly at the Daily News, where the newsroom had already been halved in 2018 under Tribune ownership in what staff called a "beheading." Further reductions followed in 2022. At the Orlando Sentinel, the editorial staff shrank to a skeleton operation, with the paper converting to primarily digital publication and reducing print frequency — a pattern consistent with what the Medill School of Journalism's State of Local News project identifies as the operational signature of a ghost newspaper.
A final edition, bundled and unsold.
Photo: Maria Tyutina / Pexels
Circulation figures told a parallel story. Tribune Publishing's combined print circulation across all titles had fallen from roughly 2.2 million daily copies in 2013 to fewer than 900,000 by 2020, as reported in the company's final annual SEC filing before going private. Digital subscription growth did not offset print losses at anything close to a one-to-one rate. Once the company was delisted, external financial disclosure ended — a consequence of going private that substantially limits researchers' ability to track subsequent performance.
The Bainum bid's failure had one documented sequel: in 2022, Bainum launched the Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit digital newsroom competing directly with the Sun. Alden itself sold the Sun in early 2024 to David D. Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, returning the paper to local, though private, ownership. The remaining Tribune titles — the Chicago Tribune, the Daily News, the Hartford Courant, and others — stayed within Alden's portfolio, continuing the pattern of hedge-fund ownership that Penny Muse Abernathy and Medill's local news research group have documented across more than a thousand American news properties since 2004.
