MAN: What hedge funds will tell you is: “This is just creative destruction in capitalism.” WOMAN 1: Communities are misinformed and uninformed and that's really dangerous.

NEWSCASTER: The Denver Post has launched a revolt against its owner, New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

WOMAN 2: It was not just about the business of newspapers, it was about what was at stake for our democracy.

[ominous music] ♪♪ [machines whir and click] [suspenseful music] NARRATOR: Your daily newspaper.

It's been a vibrant part of American life since the beginning of the Republic.

But in the first years of this century, its business model collapsed.

More than 2,000 newspapers disappeared, along with 60% of working journalists.

WOMAN: So, we've been hearing for the last decade or so that newspapers are dying, they're dinosaurs, because of the Internet, because they didn't know how to monetize it and didn't see it coming.

And that's kind of the popular narrative why newspapers are in trouble today.

There's this bigger problem.

There's an industry that's out to destroy newspapers and doing it deliberately.

[thunder and lightning, music turns ominous] NARRATOR: I read this article in the spring of 2018: an outfit that was wrecking local journalism as if it was intentional?

MAN: The Denver Post isn't dying.

The Denver Post is being murdered.

Alden Capital is murdering The Denver Post .

And not only The Post, but papers from coast to coast.

MAN: They saddle the business with debt.

They fire reporters, then they strip them for their parts.

WOMAN: Newspapers historically have been bad about telling their own story, because we're not supposed to be the story.

We're not supposed to get ourselves involved.

NARRATOR: Working newspaper men and women, like canaries in a coal mine, were the first ones to recognize a new threat to local journalism in America.

A handful of these journalists, often at great risk to themselves, decided to fight back.

MAN: There are times in your life when you are thrust into a situation where you're going to stand up and risk everything, or are you going to back down?

NEWSWOMAN: This is not just the Internet doing this.

Somebody is deliberately killing your hometown paper.

[music crescendos, then fades] NARRATOR: I'm Rick Goldsmith.

I've been reading newspapers every day since I was seven years old.

When I became a documentary filmmaker, I started making films about journalists and how America's press covered, for better or worse, the great events that affected the world around us.

Now the news industry and journalism itself were in crisis.

Why?

For answers, I turned to the journalists themselves because they were not only covering the story, they were the story.

[plane slices through the air] [nearby birds singing] MAN: What's at stake is democracy.

Somebody's got to cover the story to argue for the sanctity of facts and truth.

I mean, I've had people freed from prison based on a story.

I've had laws changed, like in a month, based on a story.

[flash bulb pops, music builds anticipation] I'll never forget the feeling watching Richard Nixon resign on television.

And I said to myself, I want to do what they're doing.

I want to be able to have that kind of impact, be able to make that kind of change.

I want to be that.

GOLDSMITH: A rising Golden Gloves boxer, Greg Moore gave up his athletic dreams for a series of newspaper jobs in his native Ohio.

He went next to The Boston Globe, where he worked as a Managing Editor next to the Spotlight team that exposed the scandal of local priests molesting young boys.

In 2002, Moore got a visit from Dean Singleton, one of the biggest media moguls of the day and publisher of The Denver Post, who wanted to infuse his paper with fresh leadership.

MOORE: Our goal was to make The Denver Post one of the top ten metropolitan newspapers in the country.

From 2002 to 2009, we were in a newspaper war with the Rocky Mountain News.

The newspaper war was positive, and it was just a rich, rich time for news coverage in the city.

I think the community was served because there were two aggressive watchdogs in the community covering City Hall, covering City Council meetings, making sure that we're paying attention to how money is being spent, how decisions are being made.

It's the day-to-day holding to account the powerful institutions in the city.

I mean, there's a real cost to not having good, robust journalism at the community level.

So, there are people like in Flint, Michigan, they changed the water supply and poisoned their citizens.

And why?

Because nobody was paying attention.

Nobody was at the Flint City Council meeting when they made that decision.

So, what's at stake is participatory democracy and being informed so that you can help rule yourselves.

And so, the journalism was really, really good.

It was really, really creative.

I think we were at our best when we were at war.

[music becomes dramatic] -Tomorrow will be the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News.

Certainly nothing you did.

You all did everything right.

But while you were out doing your part, the business model and the economy changed.

MOORE: When the Rocky Mountain News closed in 2009, it was a sad day.

There was no celebration in our newsroom.

What the community lost was 200 journalists.

And a lot of stories didn't get covered.

GOLDSMITH: By 2009, the business model of the daily newspaper in America was failing.

Advertising dollars were drying up, first the classifieds, then, as more people turned to the online product, digital ad revenue proved grossly insufficient.

NEWS ANCHOR: As internet giants like Google and Facebook suck up the advertising revenue that historically kept most newspapers in business, buyouts and mergers have left many local outlets in danger of extinction.

GOLDSMITH: In just over a decade, 2,000 American newspapers vanished.

Others became ghost newspapers, shadows of their former selves, and news deserts emerged across the country, where entire counties found themselves with no local newspaper at all.

Back in Denver, Dean Singleton's own finances were in trouble.

In early 2010, Singleton's media news group filed for bankruptcy.

A little known Wall Street hedge fund named Alden Global Capital swooped in and bought, on the cheap, Singleton's entire media news group of over 100 papers, including its flagship, The Denver Post.

GOLDSMITH: Singleton himself was known as Lean Dean and reviled by many journalists for cutting costs to the bone.

But he was also respected as a dedicated newsman, a publisher with ink in his veins.

MOORE: He really cared about the paper.

He cared about the community.

He lived here.

So, when Alden came in, we were in shock that our long-time owner somehow had lost control of the paper.

But he had sort of assured us that these were good guys and that he was going to remain as publisher.

And so, we thought things were going to be fine.

And then around 2011, things started to change, and that's when I began to worry that these outsiders were actually coming in and questioning everything.

They didn't know anything about newspapers.

They just knew that their job was to squeeze the numbers down.

[solemn music] We had the horrible Aurora theater shooting in July 2012, and those are some of the biggest stories I've ever covered where the stakes could not have been higher.

So, we had a staff of about 150 at the time of the shooting.

And literally, everyone worked on that story.

People on their way in stopped by the hospital to check on the injured.

We had about 15 or 16 photographers working around the clock.

[cameras click] And I think we helped the community understand that not only was this a tragedy for the people who lost their lives, but there were a lot of heroes.

And I think when you do a job as complete as that, you really help a community heal.

And in August of 2012, while we were in the middle of covering this story, I get a note from our CEO saying that the August numbers weren't looking that great and that he would like for me to put together a plan to cut, I forgot what the number was.

[pensive music] I mean, there was no reason for what's happened here.

We're generating $3, $4 million a year for you in revenue.

We don't just spend money.

Why are you messing with us?

GOLDSMITH: Why?

That was a question that another journalist, a thousand miles away on the California coast, was just beginning to investigate.

REYNOLDS: I have a total muckraker attitude.

I'm trying to expose wrongs so they get fixed.

[flash bulb pops] And so, I was immediately drawn to investigative reporting.

For me, it was a way to try to change the world and make it better.

You know, we shine a light on the darkness.

That's what journalists do.

One that I was very proud of, I did for Frontline World, exposing an international arms dealer.

My reporting led to Interpol intercepting him as he fled the country from my reporting.

It ended up leading to my next specialty, which was gang and youth violence coverage, which was my beat for a good ten years.

I've covered organized crime and youth violence.

Kind of a logical segue into investigating hedge funds.

[chuckles] [suspenseful music] I worked at a newspaper that was one of the best local papers around.

It was the Monterey County Herald.

We just covered the county.

The Herald was a feisty local paper, and we were kick-ass.

We had a great team.

Those were kind of our glory days.

[music turns darker] We got bought in late 2011 or 2012 by this mysterious company.

Nobody even knew who they were.

And somebody dug up the name.

It was called Alden Global Capital, and it was a New York hedge fund.

Everything was downsized.

We had layoffs pretty much every six months.

All of a sudden, all our stories were being copy edited 300 miles away, where no one knew how to spell the name of the City Council person in the story.

So, I started getting really curious about who are these people?

Why are they doing this to what was a great community newspaper?

GOLDSMITH: Alden's newspaper company was called Digital First Media, which owned local dailies and weeklies from coast to coast.

REYNOLDS: We started finding out this was happening all over the Digital First Media chain.

I mean, sure, we had been downsizing through the years.

Because of the internet, because they didn't know how to monetize it and didn't see it coming.

But this was something way beyond that.

This was something really extreme to where we started to see that these guys really didn't have any future in mind for our paper.

In March of 2015, I took a voluntary layoff and left the paper.

[music fades] [typing] I heard that the NewsGuild, which was my former union when I worked at the Monterey Herald, was looking for somebody to write some stories and edit a website.

We came up with the idea of, "you're an investigative reporter, why don't you dig into Alden and just write about who they are and what they're doing?

Because people don't know."

[dramatic music] "It's not easy to find information about Alden Global Capital.

"Because Alden is privately held, it rarely has to report "to the Securities and Exchange Commission, "and details are scarce."

So, when I first started reporting on Alden, I was a little uncomfortable reporting for a labor union.

I'm a journalist.

It kind of looks like there's conflicts of interest, all kinds of things.

But I realized that none of our newspapers were going to tell this story, and I felt that was really wrong, because there's, we are the ones who tell stories.

If this was any other kind of civic institution that was in such a crisis, we would be all over it.

So, I go to Alden Global Capital's website, and there's nothing there.

They don't want people knowing who their investors are.

They don't want people knowing all the assets that they own and what kind of transactions they're doing.

Because I started seeing that they originally incorporated in the Isle of Jersey, which is a world-renowned or infamous tax secrecy haven, kind of like the Cayman Islands.

And then a lot of their funds were based in the Cayman Islands.

And I'm like, wow, that's kind of interesting.

Why is all this stuff overseas in these tax secrecy locations?

Why can't we find out anything about these guys?

So, that just made me want to dig deeper.

[upbeat music] I really need visuals to help me understand the structure of the companies and which one owns which.

It is so complex.

These two guys here are the co-founders of Alden, Randall Smith and Heath Freeman here, very private individuals, especially Randall Smith.

"Randall Smith is many things, but he's not a man who's "ever shown an interest in protecting journalism.

"The founder of Alden Global Capital is known on Wall Street "as the grandfather of vulture capitalism.

"He seeks out distressed businesses and plunders them."

Randall Smith was one of the early pioneers of this whole vulture hedge fund strategy.

He has defined this ruthless industry.

[cacophony of voices] GOLDSMITH: In the 1980s, Wall Street was in the midst of a mergers and acquisitions frenzy.

GEKKO: Greed is good.

GOLDSMITH: Investment bankers and ambitious stock traders were looking for new ways to take advantage of the increasingly complex financing of corporate America.

Many were looking to find the hot new companies, the winners.

But a young up-and-coming trader named Randall Smith wondered, "What if there was more money to be made from the losers, the failing businesses, the bankruptcies?"

WOMAN: The early pioneers of distressed investing looked around and they said, okay, what is the thing that no one else, none of my competitors are focused on?

Oh, dying, troubled companies.

Distressed investing is called vulture investing for a reason.

They're feeding on a carcass of a company.

They want to get in, make some money, and get out.

GOLDSMITH: A rising Wall Street star, Smith began a lifelong policy of not speaking to reporters or allowing himself to be photographed.

We did find some early colleagues who spoke to us on the condition that their voices not be used.

ANONYMOUS: "I'm trying to think of what part of Randy you need insight into, other than the fact that he's basically driven by greed."

ANONYMOUS: "He can be a little sleazy around the edges, and he's very aggressive as a Wall Street guy.

And he'll push the limits of what he can do to make money for himself."

GOLDSMITH: An ingenious money-making vehicle had been around for some time and was just catching on in Wall Street.

This vehicle was called a hedge fund.

KOLHATKAR: Hedge funds became known as places to go if you wanted to get really, really rich.

GOLDSMITH: Hedge funds were limited exclusively to ultra-wealthy investors, so the Securities and Exchange Commission historically allowed these funds to operate with very little oversight.

Hedge fund owners could charge their customers high fees, pay low taxes, and have few government reporting requirements, which allowed them to keep their operations hidden from the public.

In 2007, Smith and a young protege named Heath Freeman formed their own private hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, based on Randall Smith's specialty, distressed asset investing.

COLLEAGUE: What distressed investors tend to do is they go for the unloved parts of the market, and there are few things more unloved than dead tree publications.

GOLDSMITH: Dead tree publications: newspapers, which by 2007 were already feeling the effects of changing demographics, the loss of classified advertising, and the internet.

In 2010, Alden Global Capital began gobbling up newspapers and making mountains of money.

Six years later, what Julie Reynolds was trying to piece together was how that money was made.

REYNOLDS: It goes against probably what you and I would think of as common sense.

You buy a company really cheap and try to build it up and then sell it when it's worth something.

But what Smith pioneered was the idea of buying companies that were in trouble, and instead of building them up, finding ways to extract a very hefty profit margin.

GOLDSMITH: But how the hedge fund could achieve such a hefty profit margin was still a mystery, until Reynolds took advantage of a resource available to anyone: public records.

REYNOLDS: For me, one of the biggest breakthroughs early in investigating Alden was the discovery of this little company called Twenty Lake Holdings.

Twenty Lake Holdings was on the 19th floor of the same building as Alden's headquarters, and I kept finding P.O.

box numbers and real estate deeds that were being sent to that suite number.

They were personally buying up a lot of real estate right around the time they took over our news chain and immediately just started seeing real estate, real estate, real estate.

And that piqued my interest because I'm like, this is a newspaper company, not a real estate company.

What's going on here?

I would check the Twenty Lake Holdings website.

All of the listings on there, they were all Digital First properties.

I would see these newspapers that I knew their masthead, and suddenly their headquarters is being sold.

And after about a year or two, I started seeing other newspaper companies' listings on there.

And I thought, well, I guess they figured out this is a really lucrative cash cow for them.

And if you look at old newspaper buildings, they're usually in downtowns, super centrally located.

They're usually huge, and they're a great investment.

GOLDSMITH: What Reynolds suspected, and later found out to be true, was that Twenty Lake Holdings was nothing but a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital.

[solemn music] REYNOLDS: The real estate might not seem like an important thing, but it's essential to a newspaper.

That is their safety net.

You can get through a few tough years when you own the building and the land you're sitting on.

They don't have that anymore.

Alden took that away from them.

GOLDSMITH: The real estate scheme made millions for the hedge fund and its investors.

But there was much more at stake.

And that was the future of newspapers in America, and by extension, journalism in America.

Would Alden plow its profits back into their newspapers and improve them, serve the communities better?

The answer lay in the intentions of Randall Smith's younger partner, the president of Alden Global Capital, Heath Freeman.

REYNOLDS: Heath Freeman, he's pretty much known as the cost cutter guy.

I don't know if he's ever walked into a newsroom.

He's famous for once asking about journalists, "What do all these people do?"

And just recently purchased an almost $5 million house in the Hamptons.

These are the same years when they are literally stripping hundreds of millions of dollars from Digital First Media newspapers, people who haven't had a raise in ten years, people who can barely get by.

Pretty hard to take.

MOORE: Heath Freeman, I met him a couple of times.

You know, he was charming.

He listened more than he talked.

I didn't see him much after that.

Maybe he came to the newsroom once for a tour, but that was it.

And the same is true for some of the other guys.

They were just interested in the business of newspapers, not the journalism part.

[dramatic music] It should never be easy to change the course of somebody's life.

And every time I did it, a piece of myself died.

But it also hurt to be tearing The Post down brick by brick after 14 years of killing myself and my staff to build it to where it was.

One of the things I said in my departing remarks to the staff was that I wanted to use my abilities to build something and not tear it down.

GOLDSMITH: Greg Moore resigned from The Denver Post in March 2016.

That same month, Alden Global Capital, still unknown to the public as a newspaper-owning hedge fund, dropped the bombshell on the San Francisco Bay Area.

NEWS ANCHOR: A major shakeup tonight for some historic newspapers here in the Bay Area.

The Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times, between them, they've been publishing for more than 200 years.

REPORTER: Today is the last day eight East Bay newspapers will be published.

GOLDSMITH: In one fell swoop, Alden Global Capital took eight community newspapers and reduced them to two.

REPORTER: The Mercury News and the East Bay Times.

NEWS ANCHOR: But 120 jobs will be cut as part of that consolidation.

REYNOLDS: We saw the more than 100-year-old Oakland Tribune shut down by Alden Global Capital.

It does not exist anymore.

The reporters in the Bay Area are so resilient.

They went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Ghost Ship fire.

One week after that story came out, their newsroom was cut by 25%.

Alden wasn't even aware that they won the Pulitzer.

Nobody called to congratulate the reporters.

They had to throw their own party for themselves.

GOLDSMITH: This is Thomas Peele, one of those Pulitzer winners at the moment the prize was announced.

He continued working with the Bay Area News Group.

Peele is the embodiment of shoe leather reporting.

PEELE: We have this new law in California that opens, for the first time in decades, files about police misconduct.

You have to understand how adamant the police unions are to keep this stuff secret.

Now, what's a good definition of a story or of journalism?

Something that somewhere somebody wants kept secret.

[flash bulb pops] [demonstrators chanting] Release the documents!

MAN: We have the right to know!

-Release the documents.

MAN: The police commit a crime.

-Release the documents.

WOMAN: What are you really doing?

PEELE: Historically, police in this state have enjoyed top-secret status of their internal workings and how cops are disciplined for doing bad things.

When you see people protesting over the death of a loved one in a police shooting, and not being able to get solid answers about what happened, not having access to those records, it's not public policy that enhances confidence in the police.

[voices yelling on bodycam recording] GOLDSMITH: There is a lot at stake here.

If the judge rules that the law is not retroactive, then all the records that Peele and other reporters have gathered about police misconduct going back several years will remain hidden.

PEELE: We see the resistance of it going on all over the state now with these police unions fighting in court to stop disclosure.

-When you look through the statutes at issue here, there was no express statement by the legislature of an intent to make those provisions retroactive.

JUDGE: I would suggest that you're conflating two different steps.

-No, Your Honor.

The reason.... PEELE: If you don't have people with the fundamental skills, not just the newspaper isn't going to survive, journalism isn't going to survive.

This is the training ground.

This is where people learn how to do it.

REPORTER: You want me to go grab my computer now, or do you want me to stick around?

PEELE: You need to tweet this (audio silence) if I can't tweet it.

It's the first judge in the state to rule on anything related to this.

He's going to appeal, right?

REPORTER: He said he's going to appeal, but he has to meet with his clients first.

PEELE: Get online, see if he's put his order up yet.

REPORTER: It usually takes a little bit longer, doesn't it?

PEELE: I don't know.

You're the one who's here every day.

REPORTER: By the way, my name is G a r t r e l l for the byline (audio silence) you're about to give me.

PEELE: I'm not giving you a byline.

GARTRELL: There better be a (audio silence) byline!

PEELE: I'm not giving you a (audio silence) byline.

GARTRELL: Yeah, you are.

PEELE: I bring a lot of experience in how to find records, how to get records, how to argue for records.

So, I know how to navigate a lot of it.

And that generation of reporters, you know, they want those skills.

That's critical to the kind of journalism that they want to go out and do.

Do you have the context in there of who he is?

GARTRELL: Yeah.

PEELE: Okay.

GARTRELL: Tom really pushes me to do better, you know.

He doesn't always do it in a warm and fuzzy way.

Do you want me to put his quote high up or where?

PEELE: Just put it right there.

GARTRELL: Okay.

PEELE: And do it fast.

GARTRELL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right.

I'm looking at one misspelling already.

When I started, I think we had about a dozen reporters here.

The Chronicle was here, KCBS was here, the Contra Costa Times, and the Tri-Valley Herald.

Now it's just me.

If you look around, you sort of just see relics from the ghost of journalism past.

Okay, well, I got like two minutes of what she said.

I try not to think about the possibility of not having a job, But, you know, the burden of the responsibility in knowing that I'm the only person here, I mean, I tug my hair out on a daily basis to make sure that I cover everything that I possibly can.

And even knowing that I'm still probably going to miss some stuff and it just, you know, it just drives me berserk, you know?

I've gotten bylines for doing so much less than what you just put me through.

PEELE: I already put you on it, Nate.

GARTRELL: If we don't get bylines, we don't get (silence) credit for stories.

Then we get laid off at the annual layoff event.

[mournful music] PEELE: You don't survive the cuts.

You don't survive the layoffs.

You don't survive people whispering in your ear to take the buyout.

Alden has no care about the importance and the civic involvement of a newspaper.

So, that's the scary part of it is what's left.

What's the post-Alden world when Alden will simply take a paper down until there's nothing left and there's nothing to sell?

WOMAN: We know from copious research that has been done in recent years that when a community loses a newspaper, it loses a lot.

Voter participation goes down, corruption goes up in both business and government, and we end up paying more in taxes.

Plus, misinformation and disinformation flourishes because there's no authoritative voice that's providing transparency or anything that is credible.

[flash bulb pops] GOLDSMITH: Penny Abernathy, a former reporter at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, composed an extensive report about these new private equity and hedge fund media barons and the threat they posed to local journalism.

What concerned me most is what I saw was a new type of chain entering the market run by hedge funds and private equity groups who swooped in and started managing the same way they managed a widget factory.

And they only have one mission in life.

That's shareholder return.

GOLDSMITH: Abernathy used facts, figures, and evidence on how America's news ecosystem was crumbling and issued a warning that time was running out to save local journalism.

But like the early documenters of global warming, Abernathy struggled to find an audience.

ABERNATHY: It was a very thick, well-researched report, and it landed sort of like a tree in the forest that falls and nobody hears.

Except for Julie Reynolds, who called almost immediately.

REYNOLDS: I expected this kind of serious, stuffy academic, and I found someone who just had a charming accent, real down home, real friendly, and tells it like it is.

ABERNATHY: What was thrilling for me was to have a journalist who actually understood that it was not just about the business of newspapers, it was about what was at stake for our democracy if hedge funds and private equity groups managed to enforce their vision for the future of newspapers on everyone.

[trumpets play a military flourish] [canons and guns blast] GOLDSMITH: The American Revolution was driven by the written word.

In 1776, Tom Paine used simple language and provocative phrases to incite the public.

When the war against England was won, James Madison argued that a people's government without reliable information or the means of acquiring it was but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.

[high-energy jazz] MAN: The founders of this country very explicitly thought a free press was absolutely essential to this experiment in democracy that they were launching.

If there wasn't a free flow of information and ideas and opinion, a democratic republic could not work.

ABERNATHY: In 1792, one of the first pieces of legislation passed by our new Congress was a postal subsidy for newspapers.

Legislators wanted to do that.

The founders of our country wanted to do that.

We should be clear that, of course, the Founding Fathers weren't always thinking about all members of society.

They certainly were not thinking about African Americans or poor people or Indigenous people.

But for all their flaws, they were assuming that the news should be seen as a service, not a commodity, something that was needed to inform the populace so that they could be self-governing.

GOLDSMITH: The government support ensured that this new institution, the American newspaper, would thrive well into the future.

[many conversations] REYNOLDS: I was at a journalism conference, an investigative journalism conference, kind of the cream of the crop, go to this thing.

And there's an editor from The Nation magazine on the other side of the food table.

And I start talking about this problem.

This is a guy who's a national editor for a national magazine.

And he said, "What?

Wait a minute.

What are you telling me?

All these small-town papers are being deliberately downsized?

They're being deliberately destroyed by a hedge fund in New York City, and nobody knows about this?"

[suspenseful music] "A reclusive New York tycoon and his wife began buying up "expensive Palm Beach real estate—lots of it.

"First they bought seven mansions "for a total of $23 million.

"Then another four moderately-priced homes "for 8.4 million.

"Think of those luxury homes as the shuttered offices and fired "workers of hometown newspapers across the United States."

The real big breakthrough and big change in public awareness came when I did The Nation story.

That brought it into the national arena, and that brought the whole question of siphoning money out of the papers and deliberately killing these newspapers.

For the first time that became part of the conversation.

It did change the paradigm.

KRIEGER: We would not know a lot of the details that we know about how they operate, why they operate the way they do without Julie Reynolds' journalism.

GOLDSMITH: By late 2017 Reynolds was expanding her reach, particularly among fellow journalists.

Little did she know that her ongoing investigation would spark a wildfire of action.

[music fades] MAN: It got increasingly difficult as we ended 2017.

The Denver Post looks out onto a square that has the state capitol on one side, the state Supreme Court on another, the Denver City Hall on another, and The Denver Post on another.

So, it's sort of at the center of power in Colorado.

Then we were told that we would have to leave our building.

WOMAN: We moved far away, and our office doesn't have windows, and it's literally at the intersection of an animal rendering plant, the wastewater treatment plant, a dog food factory.

[flash bulb pops] I have never known anything different than a volatile journalism industry.

I came into the industry at a time when things weren't great.

That's just sort of the way that this has always been for me.

I've always loved writing, but at some point I was like, you know, I have to find a job where I can write every day.

Once I got in an actual newsroom, I was like, oh yeah, this is it.

[typing, solemn music] "As Laura Peniche described the harrowing journey through "the desert she and her family crossed, leaving Mexico "to enter the United States when she was 13, "the tiny, sweet voices of her children playing behind her "punctuated the memory."

My dad will be like, "What are you doing?

Like, you could be making a lot more money in a way less stressful job."

And I'm like, "I could be.

Yeah."

But I love this so much.

I just feel like I can't give up on it.

WOMAN: Lizzie is really determined, and I know how brutal it can be and like the level of burnout.

And so, here's a kid who really wants to do it, I see potential in, and I'm like, okay, what do you need?

What can I do to encourage you?

[flash bulb pops] For me, the number one job of a journalist is to hold people in power accountable for the decisions they make.

And people do get mad at you, and they start yelling and screaming.

And let's say the first time you piss off a mayor or a police chief, and he calls and chews you out, you need the older journalists who's had to do that before and stand their ground to kind of help you figure that out.

And I so want to see people like Elizabeth stay in journalism and not get burned out or run out or cut by a big corporation.

[voices echo through the newsroom] We had been sent an email that there was a staff meeting, that everybody needed to be there, and we all were like, okay, we know what this is going to be.

Lee Ann, Executive Editor, she's like, "Uh, there's no need to blow smoke here.

I've got to cut a third of this newsroom.

It's 30 people."

And I felt like I'd had a baseball bat swung into my stomach.

[ominous music] And I was sitting next to Lizzie who'd already been laid off from The Post once.

And she just burst into tears and is like, leaning on my shoulder.

And I just couldn't believe it.

Like, what are we going to— Thirty?

You're kidding me!

REYNOLDS: One Opinion Page Editor there, a guy named Chuck Plunkett, just decided he'd had enough.

I had that thought that they just killed The Denver Post.

[flash bulb pops] And then I had this secondary thought: Somebody should do something about this.

And then I had the thought, well, you know, the Editorial Page Editor is the person that should do something about this.

You should do something about this.

You have a way to make it happen.

[news theme music] NEWSCASTER 1: The Denver Post has launched a revolt against its owner, New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

NEWSCASTER 2: The Sunday editorial pullout section was an act of defiance and desperation.

NEWSCASTER 1: The Post's editorial board published a lead editorial headline "As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved."

In the piece, editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett writes, "If Alden isn't willing to do good journalism here, it should "sell the Post to owners who will."

REYNOLDS: It was on the front page of The New York Times above the fold.

The Washington Post did a column about it.

Forbes.

Esquire.

It was covered in almost every national media outlet.

PLUNKETT: It's either stand up and speak up now, or write your own obituary in two or three years.

Why wouldn't you fight as hard as you could to keep that?

MOORE: It's one of the most courageous things I've ever witnessed in a 40-year career in journalism.

REYNOLDS: The cat was out of the bag.

They couldn't stop it.

People were tweeting about it.

It was all over Facebook.

NEWSCASTER 3: Journalists accustomed to asking the questions were answering them today about why they felt so strongly that they would walk out of The Denver Post newsroom to beg their hedge fund owner to stop strip mining that paper or sell it to someone who cares.

PROTESTER 1: My message today is we need public support, and we need pressure on our owners because there's an understanding that if they don't sell the newspaper, we don't have long to live.

PROTESTER 2: I've never seen anything like what Alden is doing to The Post and other newspapers that it owns across the country, nearly 200 newspapers, cutting at two to three times the rate of the industry.

NEWSCASTER: Post journalists also took their protest to Alden Capital's headquarters in New York City, where they joined employees of other papers being gutted by Alden.

-Our members are here today to deliver a very simple message to Smith and Freeman.

It's time for you to sell this company and get the hell out of the news business.

DEMONSTRATORS: Hey, hey ho ho.

Alden Global's got to go!

REYNOLDS: The idea of a reporter standing out with a picket sign and lobbying as an activist for a cause is very foreign to us.

It took a long time for people to get upset enough.

-We believe democracy depends on journalism.

MOORE: What Chuck Plunkett unleashed was, I think, permission for journalists to raise their voices to defend the importance of local news, to explain why journalism matters, and to warn the community that what would be lost would never be replaced.

A year ago this month.... PEELE: it was so bad, and I had friends who were local union activists who were like, "We need you.

You've got to stand and try to fight this stuff."

-All right, guys, let's do it.

-Go, go!

[applause, cheers] -It's 11,000 signatures from across the country.

-Drop it off for us, please.

Almost 12,000.

We brought these signatures to deliver to Heath Freeman.

SECURITY: Ladies and gentlemen, the building has requested you leave.

Failure to do so will be considered trespass.

Please exit now.

DEMONSTRATORS: Ho ho!

Alden Global's got to go!

PEELE: They won't even accept the petitions!

Only a small majority of Alden's papers are unionized.

There are a lot of newsrooms where people can't speak up at all.

So, those of us who have that right need to exercise it.

NEWS ANCHOR: Elizabeth Hernandez, let's go to you first.

You're wearing a t-shirt: #NewsMatters.

HERNANDEZ: I'm there because I want to do good journalism.

This is what I've wanted to do my entire life.

And Alden Global Capital is decimating newsrooms across the country, and we want them to invest or sell in their newspapers.

MAN: I think the Denver Rebellion was really important in waking people up as to how big a problem this was, the role of private equity in helping to at least exacerbate this problem, and giving people a little bit of a sense of like, well, we don't actually have to just sit back and take this, you know.

Maybe there are some things we can do about it.

Daily newspapers all over the country are being strip mined by a particular form of capitalism called distressed asset investing.

[flash bulb pops] And that's why the Daily Camera and its staff, along with The Denver Post and the Orange County California Register and dozens and dozens of other daily newspapers in our country keep getting smaller and smaller.

[dramatic music] Al Manzi, the publisher of the Daily Camera, sent an email to me and Kevin Kaufman, the Editor of the Camera, saying, "Hey... the Colorado Press Association is going to have a Colorado Journalism week.

Maybe we should write an editorial about that, celebrate journalism."

[laughs] And it's just, I mean, Mad Magazine couldn't have done a better job at timing that.

It was absolutely inconceivable to me that you could do that without talking about the elephant in the room.

So, I felt it was important to write about this.

I submitted the editorial to our editorial board, as I always do.

It's our standard process.

The editor of the paper approved it.

The publisher did not.

And at home the next morning, I set up the Boulder Free Press blog, created specifically for the purpose of posting this editorial, and I tweet out a link to it.

Well, that tweet went viral pretty quickly.

NEWSCASTER: The hedge fund that owns The Denver Post tried to silence a voice at the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper, which it also owns.

The editorial called Alden Global Capital an "existential threat" to the newspaper.

If you criticize your boss publicly, you're going to get fired, right?

Lots of people in lots of jobs will get fired for that.

Why is journalism different?

KRIEGER: Well, journalism is different because we're the storyteller in the community.

So, if there's another institution that's 128 years old and is on the verge of being destroyed, we would cover that story.

What hedge funds will tell you is "this is just the way it goes.

This is creative destruction in capitalism.

Newspapers are 20th-century or 19th-century technology.

They're going away.

Get used to it.

This is just how capitalism works."

But newspapers are not just any other business.

They are the only private industry specifically named in the Bill of Rights.

So, Kevin Kaufman, the Editor, sends me an email late in the afternoon saying, "We need you in here for a meeting tomorrow morning, Wednesday morning, 10 AM.

Bring your laptop."

Okay, I covered the NFL.

I know when they say "bring your playbook" what that means.

So, I shook their hands and walked out.

[somber music] Do I have regrets?

Did I go too far?

I've never been so sure of anything in my life as that this was the right thing to do, to this day.

Telling the people of Boulder what's going on about their daily newspaper was absolutely crucial to what we do.

If we don't do that, we are betraying our readers in order to keep our jobs.

It's just the height of corruption from a journalistic standpoint.

MAN: We were not allowed to publish a story about Dave Kreiger's firing.

We were told it was a personnel matter, and that we were not going to be allowed to publish anything about it.

I disagreed strongly.

[flash bulb pops] I've been in this business for 35 years.

I think I know what a news story is by now, and it became clear that this was a non-news decision to not publish that story.

That was a line for me that was just as clear as day.

There was, there was, there was no going back from that.

[music brightens] We're mourning, on the one hand, walking away from something that we all love and that we've known, and it's pushed us to become entrepreneurs.

I'm Larry Ryckman, Editor of The Colorado Sun.

The journalists you see up here today are the owners of The Colorado Sun.

And we will be the ones calling the shots.

Nobody wanted to leave The Denver Post, but it became clear to all of us that we needed to leave The Post and at least have a fighting chance to do something new.

There are eight of us who are refugees from The Denver Post.

I wanted to preserve this journalistic muscle, the decades of institutional knowledge.

We have financial backers with very deep pockets, and they are able to give us a couple of years of runway to get up and prove the concept and to build something new and to build something great.

I don't have to recruit anybody.

Alden Capital is doing all of the recruiting that anybody could ever need or want, sadly.

It does feel a little like the first day of school.

-There's a tie.

Oh, sweet!

-Can I take one?

-Yeah!

[random banter] -Perfect.

-It should be fairly instant, but let's not make promises we can't keep.

[laughter] I'm going to count down from three, so this is going to be short.

Ready.

Three.

ALL: Two.

One.

-See?

Instant.

Just like I promised.

Just like I knew it was going to be.

[cheers, applause] -Nice.

-Here comes The Sun.

RYCKMAN: Journalists tend to be a cranky and quirky bunch.

We're curious about the world around us, and we are constantly questioning each other and questioning ourselves.

There's the old saying in journalism, you know, "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out."

[fast typing, energetic music] WOMAN: One thing as I tried to clean him up by throwing people out.

When this idea came along, it just seemed like perfect timing to reinvigorate that passion for journalism.

And I thought even if it fails, even if we flop in a couple years and we don't have enough money, at least I was part of the solution.

MAN: I'm trying to put together a social calendar that kind of let's us.... We only have a couple of years of funding.

We have to get ourselves to that point where we're sustainable before that funding runs out.

It's exciting and also a little terrifying.

[chuckles] RYCKMAN: It's a fundamental piece of our democracy, and I hope that people understand that the stakes are high.

We cannot keep doing things the way we've been doing them with corporate ownership of newspapers.

We've got to find a new model.

GOLDSMITH: The old model came into being well after the Postal Act helped distribute those early newspapers, which were small operations, unable to hire any help.

[ragtime music] In 1835, a Scottish immigrant named James Gordon Bennett transformed the model.

He scraped together $500 and started his own paper, The New York Herald, and soon discovered that loading up his newspaper with advertisements produced far more income than sales of the newspaper itself.

The Herald became New York's largest selling newspaper and made Bennett one of the wealthiest men in America.

Other entrepreneurs followed Bennett's lead.

In many ways, the union of capitalism and journalism was a marriage made in heaven.

PICKARD: This commercial newspaper industry was able to produce tremendous journalism, so that people knew what was happening in their backyards.

They knew what was happening in their statehouses at the City Hall.

But as the press expanded, newspaper publishers were not necessarily concerned about informing Americans.

They were most concerned about delivering wide audiences to advertisers.

Particular groups of people, especially communities of color, were often not well served because advertisers typically wanted to reach whiter and wealthier audiences.

So, publishers wouldn't cover working-class issues.

They wouldn't serve poorer households.

GOLDSMITH: The newspaper's mission to serve the public was overtaken by the drive for profits.

-It'll make you all happy to learn that our circulation this morning was the greatest in New York: 684,000.

[applause] GOLDSMITH: The task of the Fourth Estate was to hold those in power accountable.

-You don't expect me to keep any of those promises, do you?

[laughter] GOLDSMITH: But the press lords acquired fame and fortune and came to exert influence and political power themselves.

Publishers and their editors controlled whose voices were heard and whose weren't, whose communities were covered and whose weren't, and whose perspective was presented.

Press critic A.J.

Liebling commented, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

But the business model kept the newspaper industry flush.

It supported not only news gathering, but entertainment geared to a broad audience until that business model failed.

PICKARD: That advertising revenue model, that dominant business model that worked for 125 years suddenly went up in flames.

We're seeing all kinds of pathologies settling in, including the hedge funds and the private equity firms swooping in and buying up beleaguered newspapers and dismantling them.

And Alden Capital is just the last opportunistic parasite to fester in this mess.

NEWS ANCHOR: Well, the company behind USA Today is today in the battle for its life.

Gannett facing a clear takeover bid.

The buyer, MNG Enterprises, known as Digital First Media, also backed by hedge fund Alden Global, and the largest shareholder of Gannett.... GOLDSMITH: In January 2019, Alden Global Capital made a bid to seize control of Gannett.

It would set off a four-month battle for the largest publicly-owned newspaper chain in the country.

NEWS ANCHOR: So, will USA Today and other Gannett publications benefit from this takeover, or is it going to be, as a staff writer for the Detroit Free Press tweeted out, "the end of the American newspaper industry?"

[ominous music] GOLDSMITH: Alden had taken a big publicity hit after the rebellion in Denver.

In press releases, Alden changed their newspaper chain name from Digital First Media to the more nondescript MNG Enterprises.

REYNOLDS: As this whole takeover war was escalating, when Alden was trying to take over Gannett, I started seeing in their SEC filings and press releases that Gannett was using some of my reporting to refute Alden's claims.

-Julie Reynolds' work was influential, and we read all those stories.

They were devastating in their clarity about the motivations of the principals at Alden.

Denver was the most vivid example of what MNG ownership meant, and I think the feeling across Gannett was that's a preview of a movie coming to a theater near you if they acquire Gannett.

GOLDSMITH: Gannett's board of directors voted unanimously to reject the takeover offer, but to convince their shareholders, they would need help.

We will continue the campaign to save local news.

-It was really the NewsGuild rather than the corporation that stood for the careers, the professionalism, the sense of mission that these individual journalists brought to work every day.

MAN: Alden wants to pump out at least 20% profit.

The only way it can achieve that in today's environment is to continue to lay off employees, and they've done that on a regular basis.

For the country, it's a question of whether you believe in democracy and understand that journalism is a social good.

GOLDSMITH: Portions of the mainstream press jumped into the fray.

REYNOLDS: The Washington Post picked up on two pieces of reporting that I had done years before.

-Julie Reynolds is somebody I hadn't actually heard of until very recently, when I started really digging into Gannett and the news industry.

Thankfully, she dug up a lot of information that I wasn't privy to.

This company, Twenty Lake Holdings had a website where they very openly listed some of the newspaper buildings that they had sold.

And in the last couple days before that story, we sent them some questions about their business and how they were related to Alden, and then they took down their website.

REYNOLDS: The fact that The Post took those and ran with it, I was happy with it.

They also did a story about Alden taking $250 million worth of workers' pension money and putting that into their own accounts.

Both of those got huge attention to the point where, you know, Chuck Schumer's there speaking to Congress.

SCHUMER: On the front page of The Washington Post this morning is an article about the business practices of Alden.... GOLDSMITH: On the eve of the shareholders' meeting, Schumer and 20 other senators wrote an open letter to Randall Smith and Heath Freeman urging them to abandon their takeover bid.

"Newspapers are a public good," they wrote.

"Your newspaper-killing business model is bad for newspaper workers and retirees, bad for communities, bad for the public, and bad for democracy."

WGN attempted to get a comment from an Alden spokesperson.

We called out East at the headquarters in New York City.

We were transferred.

Somebody picked up the line and said, "No, thank you," and then hung up.

We invited representatives from Alden Capital.

-We've been trying all day to reach Alden Global, and the line just rang.

-Now, the hedge fund is not commenting on this.

Alden Global Capital did not respond to our.... -Alden Global Capital did not respond to our repeated requests for comment.

[haunting music] -May 16th.

Big day for both companies.

This shareholders' meeting is going to be critical.

REYNOLDS: Gannett is guilty of many of the same things as Alden.

You know, they were the company we would always say, "At least we don't work for Gannett," you know.

Because they were known as the cost cutters.

I never thought the day would arrive when Gannett would suddenly look like actually the savior on the horse.

GOLDSMITH: The onslaught of union activism, critical news coverage, and public pressure had caught up with Alden.

By overwhelming vote, Gannett's shareholders rejected MNG's takeover bid.

[music crescendos] It was a clear victory for journalists and journalism.

The vulture hedge fund had been stopped.

For the time being.

REYNOLDS: In this episode, we want to explore how the law intersects with what can be the most intimate and difficult decision a person ever makes.

A bunch of us journalists in the Central Coast, a lot of us refugees from the Monterey Herald who had survived the Alden downsizing, decided we were tired of just always meeting in coffee shops and complaining that somebody needs to do something about local media.

And somehow we all got so excited talking about this and realized we could just actually launch a website and just do it.

In Voices of Monterey Bay, we want to include other voices.

People who are never getting coverage.

We have a section, Voices From Inside, which is written by prison inmates.

We have stories in Spanish.

We report on the Indigenous communities in our area.

The stories you get are very different because they're seeing the community through a different lens, and they're also seeing parts of the community that regular, you know, middle-aged white men are not going to see.

They're not even going to know these stories exist.

GOLDSMITH: Voices of Monterey Bay is one of hundreds of community-minded news organizations that responded to the rapid decline in local newspapers.

Most focus on local news, some on specific topics like state politics, education, or climate change.

Many are recent startups, and all treat news as a public service, not as a commodity.

Many are strengthened and supported by the Institute for Nonprofit News.

WOMAN: Newspapers are not going to recover.

Some will survive.

Some will morph and change.

But the kind of coverage you're doing and that newspapers traditionally did, are not coming back in that way.

We are building a new industry.

You're changing the culture so that the public supports news.

WOMAN: I've really seen sort of how the decline of local news has impacted my city.

There are City Council meetings that went uncovered.

There are issues of housing and homelessness and gentrification.

And these are issues that really no one is digging into, not in a meaningful way.

We started San José Spotlight because San José is the 10th largest city in the nation, and it has just one newspaper of record owned by a hedge fund based in New York.

And what that leads to is folks not being informed about what is happening at City Hall, what is happening at a neighborhood meeting, a school meeting, a commission meeting.

We created San José Spotlight to fill that gap, to bring folks that hyperlocal news that's been missing from the local media landscape in San José.

WALDMAN: At the end of the day, we're not going to save community journalism without the communities themselves taking action to help either start or support community journalism.

The flowers that've grown up amidst the rubble of the collapse of local news are very real.

A lot of them are very fragile and small, but they are showing a way.

CROSS: This nonprofit news world is this very young news startup world.

The nonprofits have to go out to their community and ask for support and say, here's what we're trying to do.

Here are our standards of journalism.

Here's the money we take.

I grew up in Flint, and I knew there was much more to Flint than just crime, sports, and the water crisis, and I needed to fill that news gap.

This year, we started focusing on gun violence and what other communities are doing to decrease gun violence.

And can this be implemented at home?

WOMAN: Philanthropy is also playing a role.

There is misinformation out there.

Communities are misinformed and uninformed, and that's really dangerous.

Philanthropy is trying to galvanize a community around this, and we're trying to get other people to realize that without good information, society's polluted.

MAN: Because we are part of this new wave, this new industry, that gives us a lot of opportunity for experimentation.

What we hope to be doing is creating a new capacity, a sustainable capacity for public service journalism, and one that is, on some level, immune or at least more protected from market forces because it depends on public support.

KRIEGER: We have all of these experiments online now in a lot of localities, but they're really small compared to what a good daily newspaper used to be.

We're trying to find a new business model that will support robust local journalism, and we have not found it.

That's why newspapers cannot go away yet.

Even if you only get your news from Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Arianna Huffington's Blockquote Junction and Book Excerpt Clearinghouse, those places are often just repackaging the work of newspapers.

And it is not just websites.

Watch how often TV news ends up citing print sources.

According to the Chicago Tribune.

-According to the Detroit Free Press.

-According to the San Francisco Chronicle.

-According to The Times-Picayune.

-The Oklahoman reports.

-The Hartford Courant reports.

-The Salt Lake Tribune reports.

It's pretty obvious: Without newspapers around to cite, TV news would just be Wolf Blitzer endlessly batting a ball of yarn around.

[laughter] The media is a food chain, which would fall apart without local newspapers.

GARTRELL: I'm going to update it.

REYNOLDS: It is so critical to keep getting that information and keep getting it from full-time, professional people who are trained in the ethics, who understand how to be fair, who understand how to dig out the truth, who know their way through a public document.

It doesn't matter to me if it's on a piece of paper or if it's on your smartphone, but you do need a professional news gathering organization to put those stories together.

NEWS ANCHOR: The media landscape may be changing once again this year.

GOLDSMITH: In the summer of 2019, Gannett, the newspaper chain that had successfully fought off a takeover by Alden, was back in the headlines.

NEWS ANCHOR: The two largest newspaper chains are looking to become one after Gatehouse Media announced it has a deal to buy Gannett.

ABERNATHY: Gatehouse had done many of the same things that Alden was accused of doing, including gutting newsrooms, consolidating newsrooms, and closing and shuttering newspapers.

Even though Alden was portrayed in much of the popular press as the worst of the worst, it was not alone.

At one point in 2012, there were as many as seven hedge funds or private equity groups out buying distressed newspaper properties at rock-bottom prices.

By the time you got around to Gannett being purchased by Gatehouse, there were really two big players left: Gatehouse and Alden.

[somber music] NEWS ANCHOR: Alden Global looking to buy Tribune Publishing.

The hedge fund company, which already owns a 32% stake in Tribune, expected to disclose an offer as soon as Thursday.

[stirring music] GOLDSMITH: Alden was back, this time gunning for big-city newspapers.

In a blitzkrieg of buying, it gobbled up a third of all shares in Tribune Publishing, instantly becoming the largest shareholder in such crown jewels of newspaper publishing as the Hartford Courant, New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel, Baltimore Sun, and The Chicago Tribune.

NEWS ANCHOR: Two Chicago Tribune investigative reporters wrote an op-ed in this Sunday's New York Times called, "Will The Chicago Tribune Be the Next Newspaper Picked to the Bone?"

What has the response been both internally and externally so far?

MAN: Well, I think we've gotten tremendous support from the other reporters, and we felt like we needed to take our battle nationally.... Alden came onto my radar screen when I saw the piece in The New York Times about The Denver Post.

We've been thrust in this position at this time.

We have a hedge fund who is trying to destroy this institution.

[flash bulb pops] JACKSON: This newsroom is a fragile thing.

It's a constellation of people who pass on to each other the standards and the methods that make it effective.

And that was what was in peril, and nobody else was stepping up to save it.

MARX: We know that if we can't find a buyer, we can't stop Alden in the next six months, Alden is probably going to institute their game plan, which means drastic and significant cuts at the Tribune that will change the Tribune forever.

JACKSON: We wrote pretty early on to Heath Freeman because we wanted to know, are we right about what we're seeing?

Is there another side to this story that we haven't seen?

Is your calculus changing in any way?

GOLDSMITH: And the response to that was?

JACKSON: Zero.

Zero.

We got no response, ever.

GOLDSMITH: The two reporters began an 18-month quest to find a buyer for the Trib to thwart Alden's takeover.

The Tribune Company had no debts and was turning a profit, so they thought that their prospects were good.

MARX: We contacted people from Los Angeles to New York, big, deep-pocket people, billionaires.

Can anything move Randall Smith?

I have no idea.

When you talk to a billionaire, the obvious ask is, "Hey, is it possible you could, you know, you could help buy this newspaper?"

JACKSON: Or play a role?

MARX: Or play a role, put together a consortium?

Please buy this newspaper, meaning the whole thing, the whole operation.

Those are some of the desperate pleas being issued by reporters at the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune, two of the papers owned by Tribune Publishing.

Let me bring in Liz Bowie.

She's the education reporter at the Baltimore Sun.

There has been an effort in Baltimore as well, Liz, as you well know.... GOLDSMITH: While Liz Bowie was at the Baltimore Sun, her union, the NewsGuild, gave her startup money to create Save Our Sun, a grassroots effort to find deep-pocket investors -I just felt somebody had to do something, and I couldn't sit on my hands anymore.

I had started at The Sun when there were 450 journalists, and it was a really robust international paper with seven foreign bureaus, a big Washington bureau, a group of national reporters who roamed the nation, and a huge local staff.

And we began talking about what it would mean to have a public attempt to get the paper back.

And so, we presented to the shareholders a petition that had been signed by 6,000 people in our community, many of them very well-known, saying, please sell the paper to these local foundations.

But of course, they weren't interested in letting it go at a price that was reasonable.

[dramatic music] GOLDSMITH: Alden had learned from its Gannett defeat.

It broke its press silence when Heath Freeman gave his first-ever interview to The Washington Post, saying, "I would love our team to be remembered as the team that saved the newspaper business."

But behind the scenes, heads were rolling.

Tribune Editor in Chief Bruce Dold was fired, as was Managing Editor Peter Kendall.

And taking no chances, Randall Smith himself joined The Tribune board.

In exchange for his seat, Smith promised the board that Alden would not attempt an outright takeover for at least a year, a promise he would break six months later.

Alden was in the driver's seat.

NEWS ANCHOR: It seems right now the hedge fund is winning and the local owners are losing.

So, is there a chance Alden will lose?

BOWIE: I think there is a chance Alden will lose.

I'm betting on Stewart Bainum.

GOLDSMITH: Stewart Bainum is a Maryland billionaire, philanthropist, and former state legislator.

Inspired by the Save Our Sun campaign, he announced he would buy The Sun from Alden once it acquired Tribune Publishing and then resurrect the paper as a nonprofit.

BAINUM: We called up Heath Freeman said, look, we want to buy The Sun.

We know you're likely to take this over.

You've got 30% of the stock now.

You've got three of the seven board seats, so you basically control the damn board.

So, what will you sell us The Sun for?

And so, he said $100 million.

[chuckles] And then we agreed on a price of $65 million, which was still like a $15 million premium over the real market value.

But I figured it's a chance to try to get in here and figure this business model out.

And then he wanted to renegotiate it later at every turn.

So, we just said, the hell with it.

We're going to go back and make an offer for the entire company.

[suspenseful music] BOWIE: It was so exciting.

It really looked as though Stewart was going to get the papers and that we were going to get more resources to do our work: more reporters, maybe more editors, more attention to what the community needed.

We were just dreaming of what we could do.

GOLDSMITH: But there was a catch.

In order to finance the purchase of the entire Tribune empire, Bainum would need a partner.

Then lightning struck.

MARX: David and I got an email from one of Hansjörg Wyss's representatives saying that he had read our op-ed in The New York Times.

He was inspired by the op-ed.

He believed the importance of the kind of journalism David and I have done through our careers, and wanted to buy the Tribune.

And could he talk to us as soon as possible?

REPORTER: Like many a great newspaper story, this one has a surprise twist: an 11th-hour bid from civic-minded billionaires.

Hotel chain owner Stewart Bainum and Swiss philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss have bid $680 million for the paper chain, exceeding the $635 million deal the company had reached with Alden.

MARX: But as journalists, that's what you hope for.

The dream is to write something that inspires people to do something, or it changes laws.

It does something, you know, something happens because of the work you do.

And of course, we were elated, you know, and surprised when this, in fact, happened 15 months after we wrote it.

GOLDSMITH: The idea was that after the sale, Wyss would retain the flagship Chicago Tribune, and that he and Bainum would seek benefactors to help the other Tribune Company papers preserve local ownership and control.

BOWIE: And I imagined that there would be eight different owners in eight different cities, all trying different things, all trying a slightly different model to bring back the legacy paper.

And I imagined that that would be such a grand experiment for this country, that we would be able to figure out how you save local news.

How do you save local news?

That's how you do it.

You experiment until you find the model that works.

We need people who care.

GOLDSMITH: But at the 11th hour, Hansjörg Wyss pulled himself out of the deal, leaving Bainum's offer in ruins.

One last hope remained.

Yet another billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiong, publisher of the LA Times, owned enough Tribune Company stock to kill the Alden takeover attempt.

Even voting abstain would've counted as a vote against the deal.

But Soon-Shiong decided not to, as revealed in an interview with reporter Kara Swisher of The New York Times.

SOON-SHIONG: I can't be responsible for Baltimore, Florida, or Chicago Tribune personally if I stop this deal.

So, I quite literally said I have to focus on Los Angeles and San Diego and literally didn't vote.

I just said, it's up to the board.

SWISHER: You didn't vote?

You didn't vote yes.

You didn't vote no.

You didn't abstain.

SOON-SHIONG: Correct.

SWISHER: Should that've been a "no" then?

SOON-SHIONG: I said, look, I'm not going to get involved in this.

Kara, it was a very complicated thing.

Whatever it is, I wanted the board to make that decision.

NEWS ANCHOR: Shareholders at the Chicago Trib have approved the sale of the newspaper to a hedge fund with a reputation for cutting staff.

NEWS ANCHOR: The deal now gives Alden total control over major daily newspapers in Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, and others.

MARX: To think that this newspaper now is going to be owned by a hedge fund that has no interest in journalism other than the money it can lace their pockets with is heartbreaking.

BOWIE: I am an eternal optimist, so I truly thought somebody would come through in Chicago.

This will happen.

We'll get Tribune.

But it didn't.

And... I lost so much faith in, honestly, kind of in our country in that moment that, like, we really don't care about local news.

GOLDSMITH: I suppose expecting billionaires to be saviors of local journalism is folly to begin with even when they are thought of as civic minded.

As for Alden, after promising its takeover offer would be a cash-only deal, the hedge fund instead saddled the Tribune chain with $300 million of debt, part of it to be paid to Alden's own companies at 13% interest.

Buyouts followed immediately, eliminating 10% of Tribune newsroom employees in just six weeks.

As for Stewart Bainum, he licked his wounds, went back to work on plan B, and re-emerged a year later.

NEWS ANCHOR: This could be a banner headline for Baltimore.

The plans for a new local news site called The Baltimore Banner that will be a nonprofit, subscription-based outlet, sometimes competing with the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

GOLDSMITH: After his loss to Alden, Stewart Bainum consulted with leaders at nonprofits and media companies to design a digital-only news model that could work.

He hired some of The Sun's top reporters, brought in others from national newspapers.

When I first came to the newsroom, the first question that was asked of me was, "What tools do you need to do your job well?"

No one in 10 years had asked me at The Sun, "What tools do you need to do your job well?"

So, it's kind of like a perfect Banner story because it talks about solutions to things.

ABERNATHY: It's very encouraging to see the number of startups we've had in the last few years, many of them nonprofit, many of them serving a valuable public service to the communities.

Unfortunately, most of the nonprofits are located in either large cities or in areas that are wealthy.

That leaves many poor areas, rural areas, and suburban areas in this country that have lost a newspaper and have no other alternative.

BAINUM: There's no industry that I'm aware of that's more integral to a healthy, functioning democracy.

So, that's the crime.

That's the business that Heath Freeman and Randall Smith are in.

And they're going to one newspaper after another, buying them up, and they'll probably buy more.

That's a symptom, really, of a broken system.

American capitalism is broken.

It has too-free a reign to ignore the public interest.

[solemn music] GOLDSMITH: It was stunning to hear a billionaire say that capitalism is broken, but how else can you explain this newspaper crisis?

It has not been a fair fight.

The wishes of working journalists and the communities they serve mean nothing to today's unregulated media barons.

REYNOLDS: The money is the number one purpose.

That can't really work with journalism.

We are a capitalist society, but it may be that the capitalist model is not appropriate for this particular service.

PICKARD: I think there simply is no market solution.

The sooner that we come to terms with that, the sooner we'll be able to create new models that are not profit-driven, that are not commercial, that serve democracy over these other concerns.

MOORE: My normal inclination is to try to solve problems, to try to find a way through difficulty, to be an inspiration and to be a leader.

[uplifting music] And I've joined with other people who really care deeply about the future of journalism, and I've been able to see a way forward.

GOLDSMITH: The Colorado Media Project was formed in direct response to the staff cutbacks at The Denver Post and the rebellion that followed.

Here, it has brought community members together with journalists to brainstorm solutions to the local news crisis.

MAN: Imagine it's five years from now.

News and information in your community is stronger and more trustworthy.

What does that look like?

GOLDSMITH: The facilitators came from an organization called Free Press, founded by Robert McChesney and John Nichols, who have written extensively for two decades on the crisis in local journalism.

In their latest report, they cited the massive funding needed—not millions but billions—to adequately support journalism in the wake of the business model collapse.

MOORE: I think when you're in a crisis, you have two obligations.

One is to sound the alarm.

Second is to push the boundaries, to consider any and everything, including tax support for public journalism.

My initial gut reaction is, what, are you crazy?

ABERNATHY: A lot of journalists are uncomfortable when you start talking about public funding.

There's the whole notion we're free and independent.

PICKARD: The idea that government hasn't been involved in our media system has always been a libertarian fantasy.

The question is how it should be involved.

WALDMAN: Local news is what the economists call a public good.

It means that it provides incredibly important services to the community in ways that might not get captured as a profitable company.

And we support things like that all the time.

ABERNATHY: In many communities, we set aside tax funds to pay for law enforcement, fire departments, libraries, our public schools.

Why would we expect journalism to have to make a profit?

Why would we not also consider that something we fund with taxpayer money?

MAN: I think we all need to be a little less scared about public funding in journalism.

The United States has a 50-plus-year history of government funding going towards media: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, NPR.

And when you look at polls around public media, it has some of the highest trust ratings.

No matter where the money is coming from, there is always a threat that the people with money will influence the editorial side.

The key is, can you create the proper firewalls and safeguards in place to prevent undue influence?

GOLDSMITH: The energy going into reinvigorating local journalism gives me some hope.

But meanwhile, private equity and hedge funds continue their plundering, and there are no signs that they will stop voluntarily.

KRIEGER: So, who owns the news?

Is it okay if small groups of secretive investors determine the fate of hundreds of daily newspapers all across the country?

Or does the First Amendment suggest that we the people own the news?

And that a free society requires a free fourth estate to shine that light on areas that the privileged and the powerful may not want it shown.

GOLDSMITH: Why not get hedge funds out of the news game entirely?

Some propose that we do that by using existing antitrust laws or passing new legislation.

And there is growing awareness that private equity is seizing control of not only journalism, but more and more aspects of American life.

REYNOLDS: I was invited to go speak in Washington.

Elizabeth Warren was introducing this legislation called the Stop Wall Street Looting Act.

I almost didn't go to Washington that day, because it was the last week of our two-week training of teenage journalists.

These are children of farm workers, English language learners.

They've never done journalism.

This is one of the most meaningful things I do every year is do this training.

And I was going to miss their graduation.

They gave me their blessing, which made it, [laughs] made me feel like I was sort of sent on a mission by the next generation.

I really thought about them because these kids want to be journalists.

They have a passion for it.

And if things keep going the way they're going, there aren't going to be any jobs for them.

And so, I really was there fighting for them.

WOMAN: I'm a grandmother, a mother.

I worked for Sears for almost 18 years until hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert destroyed my job and my financial stability.

-This bill isn't just about retail, it's about how private equity has preyed on the industries for profit.

And at the end, when the door's closed, we got nothing.

REYNOLDS: Just to see the scale of the devastation that these hedge funds have caused, it's so different to write about the numbers and write about the shell companies.

But to just hear so many people talking about what happened to them, it was really heartbreaking.

SENATOR WARREN: We have proposed a bill today to stop Wall Street looting the rest of our economy.

REYNOLDS: As a journalist I'm not going to go out and talk about legislation and stump for it.

But at the same time, I have no problem talking about something I know that's going to inform the conversation.

Far worse than the impact on workers was Alden's effect on the communities that we served.

Entire towns in our coverage area became news deserts.

And the problem now is we're seeing more and more opinion passing as news.

History will not judge us kindly if one day we wake up to realize we failed to protect our communities' right to know and in turn, our very democracy.

Thank you.

[applause] [pensive music] Those of us who are alive and watching this unfold today, we have a responsibility right now to say this is going to change our country if we don't do something about it.

This is that important.

GOLDSMITH: Why?

Why is journalism so important?

PEELE: Because the world's full of crooks.

I mean, that's what we're there to do.

I mean, those guys, you know, Madison wasn't stupid.

Jefferson wasn't stupid.

They were a lot of things.

They weren't perfect, but they saw this.

They came out of living under an oppressive regime.

They understood that putting that clause in the First Amendment were the essence of the Republic that they wanted to create.

And as bad as people think that journalism is, how we're the "enemies of the people," how much we decline because the advertising revenue has fallen off, try living without us for a while.

[pensive music] MOORE: "I don't know how long The Post is going to be around, "but I can tell you the watchdog as we know it is being "put to sleep."

"What happens when government refuses to release records or demands extreme payment for them?

"What happens when communities are flooded or are on fire?

"Do we think bloggers and 'citizen journalists' will risk "their well-being to tell those stories or fight those fights?

"Is it even reasonable to expect them to do so?

"No, and I don't think it will happen either.

"Only professional journalists will get the job done, and only "a properly resourced news organization can cross swords "with other powerful interests and come out on top."

And so I ask you, What sort of a press do you want?

What sort of a press do you need?

You know what Ben Franklin would say?

"A free press, if you can keep it."

So... can you?

[music crescendos, then fades] [driving music] ♪♪ ♪♪