Chicago Trib scribes push for local ownership
TWO top investigative reporters for the Chicago Tribune made a splash on Tuesday by calling for Alden Global Capital — the controversial cost-slashing hedge fund that owns 32 percent of Tribune Publishing — to save the newspaper by selling to a local owner.
Not mentioned in the Jan. 21 New York Times op-ed, however, is that a doomsday scenario for Tribune publications like the Chicago Tribune could be less than six months away.
That’s because Alden has a standstill agreement that expires on June 30, after which it will be free to add to its current 32 percent stake. The second-largest shareholder, LA Times owner Patrick SoonShiong, also has a standstill agreement that expires that day, allowing him to sell his 24 percent stake.
Even with just a 32 percent stake, Alden is already making changes at Tribune, which also owns the New York Daily News, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel of South Florida, Virginian-Pilot and Capital Gazette.
Last month, it placed two new directors on the Tribune’s board: Dana Goldsmith Needleman and Christopher Minnetian. Both have limited media experience and spectacular bankruptcies in their past financial deals.
And cutbacks are already taking place. Timothy Knight, the chief executive of Tribune, recently told staffers he was offering voluntary buyouts to staffers at all Tribune papers in order to avoid making cuts. Most insiders worry involuntary cuts will follow.
“Alden’s strategy of acquiring struggling local newsrooms and stripping them of assets has built the personal wealth of the hedge fund’s investors,” wrote Chicago Tribune investigative reporters David Jackson and Gary Marx on Tuesday.
“But Alden has imposed draconian cuts that decimated the Denver Post and other once-proud newspapers that have been vital to their communities and to American democracy,” Jackson and Marx’s piece continues. “Unless Alden reverses course — perhaps in repentance for the avaricious destruction it has wrought in Denver and elsewhere — we need a civic-minded local owner or group of owners. So do our Tribune Publishing colleagues.”
On the Avenue
Real estate mogul Charles Cohen is ready to unveil his latest project — the relaunch of 44-yearold Avenue magazine after more than a year without publishing an issue.
On Wednesday, Jan. 22, the day the new version of the magazine finally hits, Cohen will also be tossing a launch party at 35 Hudson Yards.
“It’s essentially a new magazine,” said Cohen, in a recent interview at 750 Lexington Ave., one of the buildings his firm owns in Manhattan.
“We don’t want to be another New Yorker and we don’t want to be New York Magazine,” Cohen said. “We want to reflect what is great about New York.”
Of course, he got off to a bumpy start when he purchased the title for a song from Manhattan Media, which was thinking of shutting it down in late 2018. He laid off most of the staff right before Christmas that year. Its then-editor-in-chief, Michael Gross, who had helped Manhattan Media owner Richard Burns find Cohen to save the magazine, stayed on board until March — but then resigned over operational differences with the new owner.
Cohen, meanwhile, had hired the noted design firm Pentagram to totally overhaul the magazine but had to push back its original relaunch date from September until now.
He hired Kristina Stewart Ward, a former features editor at Vanity Fair under Graydon Carter and an executive editor at Harper’s Bazaar, to fill the editor-in-chief spot. In her first editor’s note, she said she plans to cover “fashion, finance, tech and culture” for the six-times-a-year magazine, which will keep its circulation to only 40,000 copies in Manhattan as well as some other locations and airports.
The new cover features skyscrapers against a purple winter sky while a lone skater twirls out “2020” on the ice. Among the stories that Ward’s mentor Carter would love: Englishmen in New York. But it also features stories on fashionable Harlem, booming south Florida vacation real estate and, in a nod to the past, a man named Condé Nast. Even Avenue’s original founder, Judy Price, chips in with a column in the debut issue. Michael Calman, was installed as publisher, and he pulled in 40 ad ppages in the 132-page debut issue. “They are all full-page ads and no barter,” Calman said. And he said that luxury advertisers can see their ads printed on heavy stock paper, which gives the magazine a different feel from its many competitors in the NYC market. Cohen, who has an estimated wealth of $2.8 billion according to Forbes, said he has plans to branch Avenue out into event marketing and other areas. “We think we’ll be one of the last regional magazines standing,” he said.