{"id":179212,"date":"2018-04-16T22:47:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T03:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/04\/16\/there-is-nothing-that-high-finance-cannot-ruin\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T22:47:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T03:47:00","slug":"there-is-nothing-that-high-finance-cannot-ruin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/04\/16\/there-is-nothing-that-high-finance-cannot-ruin\/","title":{"rendered":"There is Nothing that High Finance Cannot Ruin"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>
Who has been let go since 2013<\/i><\/div>\n

Though it should be noted that destroying a newspaper is not one of the more difficult failures out there<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Demoralized by rounds of job cuts, journalists at San Jose\u2019s Mercury News<\/a><\/i> and East Bay Times<\/a><\/i> in Oakland, Calif., took their case to the public last month. At a rally in Oakland, they handed out a fact sheet detailing the \u201cpillaging\u201d of their papers, accompanied by a cartoon of a business executive trying to milk an emaciated cow. <\/p>\n

\u201cDude! I\u2019d produce more milk if you fed me!\u201d read the caption. <\/p>\n

The drawing was a barely veiled swipe at the newspapers\u2019 majority owner, a little-known hedge fund called Alden Global Capital<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Headquartered in New York with investment funds domiciled in the tax-lenient Cayman Islands and a clientele that is mostly foreign, Alden has been investing in American newspapers since 2009. Through its majority control of a management company called Digital First Media<\/a>, Alden owns nearly 100 daily and weekly papers, including such big-city dailies as the Mercury News<\/i>, the Denver Post <\/i>and the St. Paul Pioneer Press<\/i>. The company\u2019s holdings are notably concentrated in California, where it effectively owns every major newspaper around Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area with the exception of the Los Angeles Times<\/i> and the San Francisco Chronicle.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

In an extraordinary rebellion last Sunday, the Denver Post<\/i><\/a> devoted its editorial pages to series of commentaries about its parent company\u2019s practices. \u201cDenver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom,\u201d the paper\u2019s lead editorial said<\/a>. \u201cIf Alden isn\u2019t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell the Post to owners who will.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Two things about the newspapers Alden owns are clear: They\u2019re profitable, and they\u2019ve been hit with far steeper cutbacks than other newspapers.<\/p>\n

In a memo to employees last summer, then-chief executive Steve Rossi said the company was \u201csolidly profitable\u201d in fiscal 2017, and that its \u201cperformance in advertising revenue has been significantly better than that of our publicly traded industry peers over the past couple of years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Alden\u2019s alleged practice of diverting resources from its newspapers is detailed in a lawsuit filed <\/a>last month by another hedge fund, Solus Alternative Asset Management<\/a>, which owns a minority stake in Digital First Media. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is increasingly clear that the financial industry is primarily a parasitic activity.<\/p>\n

When they aren’t looting, they are scamming their clients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who has been let go since 2013 Though it should be noted that destroying a newspaper is not one of the more difficult failures out there: Demoralized by rounds of job cuts, journalists at San Jose\u2019s Mercury News and East Bay Times in Oakland, Calif., took their case to the public last month. At a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,368,364,456,523],"class_list":["post-179212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-finance","tag-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179212"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}