Photo: CODEPINK
With a population of 7.5 million in more than a hundred cities and counties and a cosmopolitan reputation, the San Francisco Bay Area sports a vibrant free press of independent newspapers, right? Guess again.
In Marin, the Independent Journal is not independent. Its masthead states clearly that it is “Part of the Bay Area News Group.” So do the mastheads of the Contra Costa Times and the San Jose Mercury News.
The Vallejo Times-Herald bills itself as “An Edition of the San Jose Mercury News.” So does the Vacaville Reporter. The Milpitis Post and the San Mateo Times come up on mercurynews.com when you call up their websites.
As it turns out, the great majority of Bay Area newspapers — including major dailies like the Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times — are now owned and operated by one company, Denver-based Media News, parent of the Bay Area News Group. And it has installed the Mercury News at the center of its regional monopoly.
Media News is also a major presence in Southern California, where it owns the papers in Long Beach, Ontario, Pasadena, Redlands, San Bernadino, and Torrance. And it owns papers in the Central Valley and up the North Coast, as well as in Colorado, the Southwest, and the Northeast.
Media News is itself owned by Alden Global Capital, a private-equity hedge fund run by one Randall Smith, a media-shy billionaire sometimes referred to as “the grandfather of vulture investing.”
There are still a few dailies in the Bay Area that Media News does not own. The Hearst chain owns the San Francisco Chronicle; venture capitalist Todd Vogt owns the San Francisco Examiner; a gaggle of local “power brokers” own the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
But pretty much everything else — weeklies included — is in the hands of Randy Smith.
Smith and his hedge fund are not alone in having recently taken control of major newspaper chains. Some 15 chains went into bankruptcy late last decade, and speculative capitalists moved in to buy them up cheap.
In the case of Media News, Smith pushed aside the chain’s founder, Dean Singleton, canned his number-two guy, and replaced his people on the board of directors with Alden execs.
By creating a near monopoly of Bay Area papers, Singleton had been able to cut costs by 30 percent. Using computerized technologies and the internet, he had “clustered” operations such as copy-editing and design in one East Bay facility, laying off a good numbers of workers. He also laid off reporters and editors and forced their union to take cuts in pay and benefits.
But that wasn’t enough. With the loss of advertising that came with the economic crash and the rise of social media, Media News went into bankruptcy in early 2010 and Alden Capital swooped in.
Since taking control of the Bay Area’s newspapers, Randy Smith has pushed Singleton’s clustering one step further and put the majority of Bay Area dailies under the central editorial control of the Mercury News.
Naturally, this hasn’t gone down well with Bay Area journalists, who see their profession being undermined by the billionaire “vulture capitalists” they should be exposing.
Writes one such journalist, Richard Brenneman, “The net impact is fewer reporters writing fewer stories, which are then edited by folks who have no connection or deep background knowledge about the communities reporters write about….”
“And that means the folks who pull the strings will be able to get away with even more.”
Vulture hedge funds work on a simple model with a short time scheme. Speculators like Randy Smith sniff out a company or industry in distress, buy it up cheap, and blow some air into it. Their primary goal is to sell out at a profit.
That process leaves the Bay Area with a monopolized and increasingly centralized press — newsrooms shorthanded and staff poorly paid. The papers are controlled by a speculative billionaire today. And when he sells off tomorrow, who will they be owned by and in whose interest — the one percent or the 99 percent?
