The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
The wooden heels on my shoes made an absurdly loud clip-clop, clip-clop as I walked down an empty hallway inside the Arizona Daily Star’s former office building.
This was a few years ago, before the pandemic pushed us out of the newsroom, but after the Star’s staff already had shrunk quite a bit. As I walked the hallway, the clip-clop echoed off the walls, a lonely sound that reminded me with every footfall that the days of newsrooms overflowing with the hustle and bustle of reporters, copy editors, designers and a multitude of others were a thing of the past.
I’d walked the hallway before, in quieter shoes, in 2009 when I was an intern at the Tucson Citizen, just months before that paper ended its nearly 140-year run. Back then, Tucson and many other cities had dueling newspapers and the hallway ran between the newsrooms of the Citizen and the Star. I used to look down the hallway at the brown double-doors that opened into the Star’s newsroom, a competitor at the time, and wonder what was beyond them.
For five years, I got to see what was beyond those doors: a team of people doing their best to inform the million-plus residents of the Tucson area about the world around them and trying to get answers about events that encroached on their daily lives.
The loneliness of the hallway and the clip-clop of my shoes came to mind last week when I heard the worrisome news that a hedge fund that bought and gutted newspapers across the country now planned to buy Lee Enterprises. Lee owns the Star in a partnership with Gannett, which owned the Citizen.
The seemingly inexorable shrinking of the news business, which claimed the Citizen and emptied the hallway, has come for the Star.
Last Monday, Alden Global Capital announced it wanted to buy Lee, which owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Buffalo News, the Omaha World-Herald, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and dozens of other newspapers.
Alden already owns 6% of Lee and wants to buy the rest in as little as four weeks. For now, Lee executives are taking steps to stop Alden from owning more than 10% of Lee for the next year, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
We know very little about Alden’s plans for the Star or how the joint ownership would factor in. But we can make educated guesses by looking at the widespread cuts to staff at the other newspapers it snatched up in recent years.
Alden bought the company that owns the Denver Post and proceeded to make the newspaper a shell of its former self. Cuts to newspaper staffs started within weeks after Alden bought Tribune Publishing, which owns the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel, in May.
“The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring out as much cash as possible,” McKay Coppins, a reporter with the Atlantic, wrote last month in an extensive profile of Alden.
“They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think that’s honestly a misnomer,” a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune told Coppins. “A vulture doesn’t hold a wounded animal’s head underwater. This is predatory.”
Cuts to newsrooms mean fewer stories for readers and less time for reporters to dig into complex topics. It also means a loss of skill and expertise that take years, if not decades, to develop.
When we still worked at the Star’s old office building, I sat next to a reporter who often called family members of people who died in car wrecks or acts of violence. I heard the compassion and respect in her voice, combined with the professionalism of doing her job well and getting the information we needed for the story. That skill is a treasure for the Tucson community.
I’ll never forget watching a veteran Star reporter fine-tune a story we worked on together. The story was complicated, but he knew the ins-and-outs of the topic so well, and he could see the story so clearly, that his editing was smooth as silk. His fingers flew over the keyboard like he was playing a piano. He retired a few years ago and I sorely miss his voice in the Star.
As Alden moves toward gutting the Star, we could argue that local newspapers are essential to democracy or that newspapers are vital expressions of a community. But I suspect those arguments would fall on deaf ears. Alden treats newspapers as collections of revenue-generating widgets or, perhaps more precisely, as profitable brands they can suck dry.
It looks like we have a year before Alden can buy Lee. It’s going to be a rough one. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the words that will guide me over the next year: Remember what the Star means to you and imagine what Tucson would be without it.
