In a presentation at a publishers’ conference, Adams Publishing’s CEO Mark Adams said the company plans to keep family ownership of its newspapers, and aims to extract profits of 15 percent. According to Abernathy, Adams is now the fourth-largest chain in the country, after GateHouse, Gannett and Digital First Media. More recently it acquired papers from Civitas in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee.
One rising star is Adams Publishing Group, which has been buying up small papers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio and Maryland. In this turmoil, a few interesting players have emerged, giving signs of hope to those who have endured the endless cuts, asset sales and layoffs under the likes of Alden. “I think we’re going to continue to see the churn that we’ve seen. They halved them off in geographic markets,” she added.
“Last year, six of the top news chains were owned by these private equity firms. Together, Civitas and 1013 owned a combined total of 135 small papers, she said. The website for Reno-based 1013 Communications has since shut down. chain called 1013 Communications, which sold half of its 45 papers to Hearst Newspapers and half to private equity firms, Abernathy said. Of the top news chains owned by private equity companies, two have liquidated entirely - Civitas, formed by Versa Capital Management, and a Western U.S. Seventy-two dailies have been lost either through closures or mergers,” she said, adding that 1,300 weeklies have disappeared.Īnother development since Abernathy’s groundbreaking report two years ago is that two hedge-fund-controlled firms have now gotten out of the news business - a hopeful sign for those enduring the devastation wreaked on both newsrooms and communities by firms such as Alden. In 2004, “one of the last normal years,” she said, the U.S. “And if there’s no longer a paper that covers you, that’s a news desert.” “They’ve been downsized to ghost newspapers,” Abernathy said. That’s exactly what happened in California to the century-old Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times - along with a number of San Francisco Bay Area weeklies - after Alden took over Digital First Media. “The Chapel Hill (North Carolina) weekly is now nothing but an edition - a one-page insert - of the Raleigh News Observer,” Abernathy said. Some of the ghost newspapers are publications that have shut down and become a single page that appears once a week in a larger newspaper, miles away from the action. Not only has her prediction come true, but it’s manifested in these ghost newspapers - bare-bones entities that, due to drastic downsizing, now cover a fraction of the issues they once did. “If you think how many papers have been merged or downsized into nothing, that leaves a hole in where people get their news,” says Abernathy, author of “ The Rise of a New Media Baron,” a 2016 University of North Carolina report that described the profound impact that hedge fund ownership of newspaper chains is having on coverage. Now Abernathy says news deserts are on the rise, fueling concerns about the lack of watchdogs and oversight in communities large and small across the U.S. And it conjures perfectly the legacy of hedge fund Alden Global Capital as it pillages the Digital First Media chain. The bleak metaphor is a reference to pared-down-to-nothing papers (or even single-page inserts) that are the remnants of once-robust local publications. Now she’s added a new expression: Ghost newspapers. Ma– It was probably Penelope Muse Abernathy who put the term news deserts into our lexicon, predicting two years ago that large swaths of the country would soon be left without a reliable local information source. Glimmers of hope as some hedge fund owners get out of the news business Shuttering papers and turning them into weekly inserts is accelerating the rise of news deserts, researcher says
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