Please buy this newspaper
Like any good tabloid headline, it’s simple, snappy and succinct: 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.
The situation is dire.
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.
To folks like me, veterans of local journalism, and for people like you, who appreciate what local journalism offers, this constitutes an emergency. Since my first job with Associated Press in 1980, I’ve watched in dismay as the newspaper business contracted across the decades.
And since my arrival at The News in 2007, it’s only grown worse.
The News, time-tested in the nation’s busiest and most competitive news market, needs investment, not further cuts. It needs to focus more resources on covering our complex and challenging and diverse city. It needs a new, committed New York City owner, not a visiting vulture standing alongside the newsroom bust of our founder, Joseph Medill Patterson.
The Alden deal appeared a fait accompli until a group of wealthy investors in recent months announced a bid to save Tribune and preserve the quality of journalism at its newspapers.
Stewart Bainum, a Baltimore hotel magnate, remains committed to luring fellow deep-pocketed investors to make a bid larger than Alden’s pending $630 million offer. He hopes to not only save the papers but to help them flourish moving forward.
Bainum’s deal, while potentially salvation for the Daily News and other papers, is not a sure thing. But it’s almost impossible to imagine anything as worse than the Alden alternative.
Tribune signaled they were willing to listen, but time is running out: The vote on the Alden offer is set for May 21. New York City, a place brimming with millionaires and billionaires and civic-minded nonprofits, is teeming with potential new owners to steer our tabloid into the future — and we’re looking to team up with one.
Or two. Or three.
The stakes are clear. An Alden takeover is sure to mean a trail of laid-off journalists, contracted newsrooms, and shadow newspapers unable to cover local news and inform their communities.
If successful in buying Tribune, however, Bainum said he plans to sell the company’s papers to local owners.
That’s a sentiment we can get behind. Of course, the ultimate owner would matter, but someone with strong New York roots and a dedication to good journalism is sure to be better for the Daily News’ future.
The newspaper belongs in the hands of someone who cares deeply about our city, not some nebulous group of far-flung managers with no real skin in the New York game.
The News can take a punch and get up. Since the 1990s, we’ve been buffeted by unrelenting staff cuts and the recent change in ownership. The staff, once big enough to fill the sprawling newsroom in its old 42nd St. home, now stands at just over 100.
Hit with furloughs, pay cuts and a pandemic shuttering of our newsroom, we stepped up as staffers and unionized to ensure we have a strong voice in advocating for ourselves and our paper moving forward (Full disclosure: I am a proud member of the Daily News union).
We’re no longer the nation’s highest-circulation newspaper. But our identity remains unchanged: We’re journalists working around the clock to give readers a comprehensive chronicling of life in New York.
Our reporters won Pulitzer Prizes as they uncovered corruption and held political leaders to account. The Daily News was around to welcome Jackie Robinson and wave goodbye to the Brooklyn Dodgers. We mourned on 9/11, even as we told the stories of that day.
The staff continues in that tradition despite the obstacles created by the Tribune cuts. The staff photographers are gone from New York’s Picture Paper. The overnight tours, known as the lobster shift, are long gone. Our ability to cover local government and national politics has shrunk drastically in the last 30 years.
But we ain’t dead yet. Our newspaper and its website still draw millions of readers each day. Our reporters get stories no one else can — acknowledged each year by numerous awards.
Now it’s time for someone in this city of 8.6 million people to step up and save New York’s Hometown Paper. Anybody home?