STRIPPED FOR PARTS

By Grace Galletti, Stripped for Parts Impact Coordinator

Last October, the Press Democrat put on a screening of Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink as part of their Trust & Democracy speaker series co-hosted by NorCal Public Media. The screening event, according to The Press Democrat, “stressed the need to explore new methods of funding local journalism in order to protect democracy and the public’s right to be informed.”

During the Q&A that followed the film screening, with Director Rick Goldsmith and Press Democrat executive editor, Chris Fusco, “Goldsmith said hedge funds, which have come to dominate the modern-day news industry, don’t care about journalism and the work this industry does to safeguard the public’s right to know. Instead, he said, they tend to want to make as much money as they can.”

Ironically, on May 1st, just six months after the screening, MediaNews Group, owned by Alden Global Capital, swooped in and bought the Press Democrat, along with six other Bay Area newspapers under the umbrella of Sonoma Media Investments (SMI). Employees had been told that the sale was being made to Hearst and were not informed of the switch to Alden Global Capital until after the sale was made. 

“We were absolutely taken off guard and blindsided by the news,” said Christopher Chung, Press Democrat visual journalist and president of the newsroom’s union, Pacific Media Workers Guild Local 39521. 

Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, said Alden’s approach is driven by profit, according to SFGATE. “Unfortunately, I think the worries are justified,” Edmonds told SFGATE. “I think that there are likely to be pretty substantial cuts, and probably quite quickly.” 

As we found in the making of Stripped for Parts, an Alden Global Capital takeover is often bad for local journalism — staff cuts, newspaper closings or consolidations, outsourcing of the copy editing to people who no longer live in the community, and reduced local coverage. Most significantly, “when a community loses a newspaper, voter participation goes down, corruption goes up”, and “misinformation and disinformation flourishes”, said Penny Abernathy, former journalist and Knight Chair in Journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

The Press Democrat was founded in 1897 and owned by the New York Times Company for a time. In 2018, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its coverage of the devastating Tubbs Fire, which tore through Sonoma County, destroying entire Santa Rosa neighborhoods and killing 22 to become one of the most destructive wildfires in state history.

Alden already owns a significant number of Bay area newspapers including the East Bay Times, Marin Independent Journal, The Mercury News, The Reporter (Vacaville), and Times-Herald (Vallejo). Alden also owns at least 68 daily newspapers and more than 300 weeklies across the country. 

We will be watching what happens to the Press Democrat and its sister papers under Alden’s ownership in the months to come.  We wish the journalists there all the best as they persevere under likely trying circumstances.

Here is the list of newspapers Alden Global Capital just acquired:

• The Press Democrat
• Sonoma Index-Tribune
• Petaluma Argus-Courier
• North Bay Business Journal
• Sonoma County Gazette
• Sonoma Magazine
• La Prensa Sonoma

See our list of compiled Alden Global Capital owned newspapers here.