14 ms·

Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund gutting newsrooms

155 points by Tycho 5y ago

cageface 5y ago
I normally refrain from making meta comments about site implementations but this site doesn't scroll at all in Safari. There needs to be a hippocratic oath of web development.
- runako 5y ago
  Do you have a content blocker or other plugin? It scrolls in my Safari fine (Mac, Big Sur).
  - cageface 5y ago
    Yeah it works in an incognito window. I've never seen a site that completely breaks scrolling with a content blocker installed before.
    - stordoff 5y ago
      I've seen it happen once or twice in Chrome. IIRC, it was when an overlay element (newsletter or paywall prompt) was removed, but an invisible <div> that blocked scrolling was left behind (it would usually be removed when the prompt was dismissed).
      - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
        I find this pretty frequently (a few times a day) with GDPR cookie consent modals.
    - kwere 5y ago
      classic bug into feature
jaredwiener 5y ago
If any newsroom brass is reading this (or independent reporters, especially local) -- I'd love to talk. We're building a platform to help monetize journalism outside of the usual predatory social media/aggregator set up. jared (at) nillium (dot) com
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  In one sentence, what is your primary source of revenue expected to be (aside from VC funding if any)? Do you intend to sell or operate personalized advertisements? Do you intend to sell anonymized (or not) customer data as a revenue source?
  - jaredwiener 5y ago
    > In one sentence, what is your primary source of revenue expected to be (aside from VC funding if any)? Freemium model: advertisement based, with a subscription fee for some extra content personalization. > Do you intend to sell or operate personalized advertisements? Not "personalized" the way that you are intending. At the moment we do fall back to programmatic bidding ads like AdMob by default, but the general idea is local based ads. Since its local news, and we know your locale, we sell to local businesses -- it's essentially the same "targeting" that your local newspaper has been doing for the last 100 years. > Do you intend to sell anonymized (or not) customer data as a revenue source? No.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      Excellent!
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  How will it differ to Substack?
  - jaredwiener 5y ago
    Substack is great for people who already have an audience, or when you write analysis or opinion; it doesn't really work for a team of people covering hard/spot news. It also isn't real time -- so it doesn't really work to cover things _as they are happening._ We're building a network of local journalists, along with others in national verticals. The incentive structure exists in a way to promote news people want to come back to read, not clickbait headlines, divisive or anger driving hot takes, or lowest common denominator coverage. All geared to 18-34 year olds, who are less likely to consume local news in the traditional forms, like subscribing to a local paper or watching broadcast TV.
sneilan1 5y ago
Does anyone have a TLDR? I love the Atlantic but they assume I have more time than I do.
- nverno 5y ago
  It's a smear piece. There may be some truth to the characterization of people behind the firm, but as a reader it's impossible to know given the animosity of the writers towards their subjects. They claim the vulture capitalists are destroying local news for the sake of profits, while the vultures claim they buy businesses on the brink of destruction and attempt to update their business models/salvage something. The article doesn't delve into the actual economics of any of it, however.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    If only the victim of this smear had some sort of popular media access...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- Invictus0 5y ago
  Alden buys newspapers, jacks up the subscriptions prices, slowly cuts staff and other costs, and milks the profits as long as possible. Classic corporate raider playbook.
- Tycho 5y ago
  This hedge fund is the second biggest newspaper owner in the country but the founders supposedly rarely show their faces in any newsroom, make no public statements, and one of them hasn’t even been photographed since the 80s. There’s also an implication that they are deliberately destroying the papers for the sake of short term profit, but the business details are a bit sketchy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jcfrei 5y ago
Looks like Alden is a fund that just capitalizes on the fact that people are very slow in cancelling their subscriptions. It's nothing to be proud of and fittingly their website doesn't provide you with any information about the fund or the team. But ultimately they just accelerate an inevitable change in the business model of journalism.
- drewda 5y ago
  At many of these papers, advertising is the greater source of revenue than subscriptions.
  - Denvercoder9 5y ago
    But advertising only sells when you've got subscribers.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Until recently. Advertising virtually completely dried up during the initial Covid shutdowns. It emerged that the Chicago Tribune wasn't even paying rent. https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2021/01/21/sterling-bay-sues-tribune-over-5m-in-skipped-rent/ https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2021/01/21/sterling-bay-sues...
slownews45 5y ago
I don't think anything is that secret about their business model. You see this same model with legacy enterprise software and other long tail recurring revenue soures. You largely give up on growth, but drop costs to near zero if you can and buyout based on the tail that will stick for a while. There are often hyperbolic claims that these local newsrooms would be making tons of money if only an investor came in who understood business - but the newsrooms never seem able to find that investor. Employee buyout efforts also have fallen flat, efforts which are driven by I think very clear views on what Alden will do (cut costs!). Separately, not all news has fallen - Wall Street Journal has to be making good money off their subscription and print product, they've taken a bit more of a middle of the road path relative to other media. NY Times and Washington Post also probably doing OK for various reasons. There is a real need for local news however, desperate, and ideally not the hard left / right type stuff that seems to emerge on social media.
- xxpor 5y ago
  It was always inevitable that the largest newspapers would be the winners in a world with the internet. The only thing that propped up local newspapers was the monopoly they had on local distribution (for readers) and therefore eyeballs (for advertisers). The internet completely breaks that. The unfortunate part is that the monopoly did pay for actual local reporting. But the ad supported business model for reports from city hall just isn't there any more in smaller cities.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    And as you got into even smaller markets, local newspapers and reporting was always a shaky business. My town had a rather good local paper for a number of years but it was pretty much a labor of love and the publisher became ill and it shut down. Now, it's hard to find out about just about anything going on in town outside of Facebook and Nextdoor.
- wahern 5y ago
  The NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have all adopted partisan baiting techniques to draw in subscribers. (IMO, they've done so in that order, with Washington Post the most extreme, and NY Times bringing up the rear but quickly closing the gap as they've cycled out their older reporters with younger ones the past few years.) Their actual news reporting has suffered considerably, though they're such large organizations with enough veteran journalists that they do still put out some good pieces somewhat regularly, especially relative to newer media and smaller media.
TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
You could tell a similar story about vulture capital in many other industries. So it makes me wonder: what value to society do these practices provide? Would there be any great loss in making these sorts of actions illegal? (Of course, good luck distinguishing between genuine attempts to save failing businesses and vultures…)
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
  Yeah I’m deeply tired of every single human endeavor’s existence being solely judged on its ability to provide returns to shareholders. Wish we could just nationalize stuff that people like which doesn’t generate profit. I sort of used to think that was the point of the state but I live in the US where the government is just a entity to provide contracts to corporations.
- zz865 5y ago
  I think the point is these media companies are near-worthless, if vulture funds didn't buy them no one else would and they'd just fold.
  - human_person 5y ago
    What do you mean by 'near-worthless'? A small radio station that provides connection, information and entertainment to a rural area and a handful of jobs for community members might be "worthless" in the sense that it wont create massive returns for an investor but that doesnt make it worthless to the community it is a part of. The problem is these vultures come in make false promises about supporting the station and then suck it dry. In the end the vultures walk away with a tidy profit and the community is worse off. Just because we cant quantify the value of something in terms of hard currency doesnt make it worthless.
    - haneefmubarak 5y ago
      I believe that by "near-worthless" they mean that a given company is hemorrhaging assets and basically about to fold. A business that continuously runs net negative has to close at some point without an external influx of capital, after all. The alleged theory goes that since without the help of some fund such a company is going to fold anyways, the fund can't really do much worse than the alternative, so might as well let them have a shot at repairing the business and rescuing it. Sometimes they're successful, sometimes they're not.
WalterBright 5y ago
One model that counter-intuitively may work is the Open Source model. For example, I'm the CEO of the D Language Foundation. I take no salary from it. Sometimes I'll get a paid gig for things like training or a special project. Most contributors are in the same situation. We do have corporate contributors. Their help enables us to have a staff of paid people, and defrays other costs like cloud fees. The web site has some affiliate Amazon ads for programming books and D swag, and we acknowledge our sponsors, but we don't have paid advertisers. The software we make does not present any ads or do any telemetry of any sort. And yet it all works, and has been for 20 years now. Simply because we like what we do for its own sake. Consider that for anyone wanting to start such a thing for local news, the barriers to entry are really, really low.
- tlb 5y ago
  Wikipedia makes a good open-source replacement for geopolitical news, just a little behind. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%932021) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80... gives a much clearer picture of what happened than all the newspaper coverage over the last 20 years.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Wikipedia is exceptionally good at providing an overview of large and complex stories, especially those without a group or interest advocating for a specific narrative. It does less well in other areas: - Covering corporate dealings of substantial companies, especially those which can either drive or suppress specific narratives. - Similarly, political stories of a similar nature, especially by powerful or oppressive regimes. - Generally, the "BLP problem", biographies of living persons. Here, Wikipedia tends to bend over backwards in not crossing live wires or contentious points, though it may do so where sufficiently credibly sourced references exist. Note that this is frequntly predicated on an indepndent press, both in the tradititional sense and in the sense of "independent of Wikipedia itself". BLP also suffers from the partisans / advocates challenge (as well as the opponents / enemies one). None of these problems are exclusive to Wikipedia, and they've long been an issue with both encyclopedias and newspapers. Commercial, advertising-supported newspapers have their own biases, but they've also long had an ancillary function of affording legal cover and protection to their journalists and publishers, a capability that a strictly volunteer effort would lack. Wikipedia's other weakness is in providing consistent and sufficient coverage of small and local concerns. I've noticed this in the case of Covid-19 coverage, something which the site does an excellent job of at large scale, whilst many individual country pages have badly outdated and inaccurate information. Filling in the holes and small details is something Wikipedia does quite unevenly. As a sole source of local small-town news concerning business, politics, crime, and culture, I suspect the Wikipedia approach would prove badly lacking. The emerging news landscape seems to manage with the big picture. It's small and local news that are most neglected.
xrd 5y ago
It is so crazy to me that Americans seem like the most patriotic people on the planet (but I'm American, so maybe I am missing things) BUT... ... given the choice of buying something local or from Amazon (that comes from China) if it costs $1 less, Americans will almost always go for the Chinese merchandise, or shop at Walmart to save a few bucks. .. given a choice between news that is written by locals, or a newspaper as described in the article, where they outsource the design work to the Phillipines, at least a large percentage of Americans will simply go with the better designed one, and never question the messenger. Americans are a very confused tribe, in my opinion, and I say that as one of them.
- simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  As a foreigner, who has lived in the US for ~9 years, I can say that I mostly admire the "sane" patriotic spirit that most Americans have ("not sane" would be the racist, xenophobic type, which I instead condemn). Your points about where money is spent still stands; but I don't think it makes Americans less patriotic. You might also be true that they are "a very confused tribe", but rest assured that most people in the world think the same about their people.
  - xrd 5y ago
    That's reassuring to know we are all nuts! Thanks for that. ;)
- snarf21 5y ago
  Yeah, everyone wants dollar stores but forgets that they only exist because of exploiting foreign labor. If we made the same garbage here, it would cost a lot lot more. And eventually, this will be done via automation and the jobs will disappear over there too. We don't like to think about how other people are treated and have somehow convinced ourselves that we deserve to be treated better because they "don't have to do the crappy job". And this isn't just overseas. Look at the Nabisco and Kellogg strikes; I didn't see mass protesting going viral online and people refusing to buy those products. I'm sure people who know someone directly affected were more likely to boycott. It is sad that we are such a selfish species and have completely lost all empathy.
dillondoyle 5y ago
I used to buy ads on denverpost.com before Alden bought them. Then the site because the largest piece of hot garbage ever. I don't know who in the world would pay for ads on there anymore. any visitors they do have probably wouldn't even see your ad since there are like 4 layers of ads on top of each other, with multiple embedded auto play videos and outstream ads blowing up my laptop fan. PLUS they even fire inline ads on paywall impressions which makes them un viewable! Basically the opposite digital media approach as NyTimes and others who focus on high quality impressions and subscriber revenue. But people are still paying for impressions so I guess it works. * I personally like the Axios model of a high quality ad for high quality audience + they are trying to sell their own software for additional revenue.
toss1 5y ago
>>The model is simple: gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring out as much cash as possible. Yup typical MBA vampire business model, zero out all functions related to long term growth, organizational resiliency, or social capital, and just extract cash until the organization dies. Nevermind that the effect will corrode the very democracy that supports making their profits...

155 points by Tycho 5y ago

I normally refrain from making meta comments about site implementations but this site doesn't scroll at all in Safari. There needs to be a hippocratic oath of web development.

runako 5y ago
Do you have a content blocker or other plugin? It scrolls in my Safari fine (Mac, Big Sur).
- cageface 5y ago
  Yeah it works in an incognito window. I've never seen a site that completely breaks scrolling with a content blocker installed before.
  - stordoff 5y ago
    I've seen it happen once or twice in Chrome. IIRC, it was when an overlay element (newsletter or paywall prompt) was removed, but an invisible <div> that blocked scrolling was left behind (it would usually be removed when the prompt was dismissed).
    - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
      I find this pretty frequently (a few times a day) with GDPR cookie consent modals.
  - kwere 5y ago
    classic bug into feature

jaredwiener 5y ago

If any newsroom brass is reading this (or independent reporters, especially local) -- I'd love to talk. We're building a platform to help monetize journalism outside of the usual predatory social media/aggregator set up. jared (at) nillium (dot) com

floatingatoll 5y ago
In one sentence, what is your primary source of revenue expected to be (aside from VC funding if any)? Do you intend to sell or operate personalized advertisements? Do you intend to sell anonymized (or not) customer data as a revenue source?
- jaredwiener 5y ago
  > In one sentence, what is your primary source of revenue expected to be (aside from VC funding if any)? Freemium model: advertisement based, with a subscription fee for some extra content personalization. > Do you intend to sell or operate personalized advertisements? Not "personalized" the way that you are intending. At the moment we do fall back to programmatic bidding ads like AdMob by default, but the general idea is local based ads. Since its local news, and we know your locale, we sell to local businesses -- it's essentially the same "targeting" that your local newspaper has been doing for the last 100 years. > Do you intend to sell anonymized (or not) customer data as a revenue source? No.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Excellent!
1cvmask 5y ago
How will it differ to Substack?
- jaredwiener 5y ago
  Substack is great for people who already have an audience, or when you write analysis or opinion; it doesn't really work for a team of people covering hard/spot news. It also isn't real time -- so it doesn't really work to cover things _as they are happening._ We're building a network of local journalists, along with others in national verticals. The incentive structure exists in a way to promote news people want to come back to read, not clickbait headlines, divisive or anger driving hot takes, or lowest common denominator coverage. All geared to 18-34 year olds, who are less likely to consume local news in the traditional forms, like subscribing to a local paper or watching broadcast TV.

sneilan1 5y ago

Does anyone have a TLDR? I love the Atlantic but they assume I have more time than I do.

nverno 5y ago
It's a smear piece. There may be some truth to the characterization of people behind the firm, but as a reader it's impossible to know given the animosity of the writers towards their subjects. They claim the vulture capitalists are destroying local news for the sake of profits, while the vultures claim they buy businesses on the brink of destruction and attempt to update their business models/salvage something. The article doesn't delve into the actual economics of any of it, however.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  If only the victim of this smear had some sort of popular media access...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Invictus0 5y ago
Alden buys newspapers, jacks up the subscriptions prices, slowly cuts staff and other costs, and milks the profits as long as possible. Classic corporate raider playbook.
Tycho 5y ago
This hedge fund is the second biggest newspaper owner in the country but the founders supposedly rarely show their faces in any newsroom, make no public statements, and one of them hasn’t even been photographed since the 80s. There’s also an implication that they are deliberately destroying the papers for the sake of short term profit, but the business details are a bit sketchy.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jcfrei 5y ago

Looks like Alden is a fund that just capitalizes on the fact that people are very slow in cancelling their subscriptions. It's nothing to be proud of and fittingly their website doesn't provide you with any information about the fund or the team. But ultimately they just accelerate an inevitable change in the business model of journalism.

drewda 5y ago
At many of these papers, advertising is the greater source of revenue than subscriptions.
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  But advertising only sells when you've got subscribers.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Until recently. Advertising virtually completely dried up during the initial Covid shutdowns. It emerged that the Chicago Tribune wasn't even paying rent. https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2021/01/21/sterling-bay-sues-tribune-over-5m-in-skipped-rent/ https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2021/01/21/sterling-bay-sues...

slownews45 5y ago

I don't think anything is that secret about their business model. You see this same model with legacy enterprise software and other long tail recurring revenue soures. You largely give up on growth, but drop costs to near zero if you can and buyout based on the tail that will stick for a while. There are often hyperbolic claims that these local newsrooms would be making tons of money if only an investor came in who understood business - but the newsrooms never seem able to find that investor. Employee buyout efforts also have fallen flat, efforts which are driven by I think very clear views on what Alden will do (cut costs!). Separately, not all news has fallen - Wall Street Journal has to be making good money off their subscription and print product, they've taken a bit more of a middle of the road path relative to other media. NY Times and Washington Post also probably doing OK for various reasons. There is a real need for local news however, desperate, and ideally not the hard left / right type stuff that seems to emerge on social media.

xxpor 5y ago
It was always inevitable that the largest newspapers would be the winners in a world with the internet. The only thing that propped up local newspapers was the monopoly they had on local distribution (for readers) and therefore eyeballs (for advertisers). The internet completely breaks that. The unfortunate part is that the monopoly did pay for actual local reporting. But the ad supported business model for reports from city hall just isn't there any more in smaller cities.
- ghaff 5y ago
  And as you got into even smaller markets, local newspapers and reporting was always a shaky business. My town had a rather good local paper for a number of years but it was pretty much a labor of love and the publisher became ill and it shut down. Now, it's hard to find out about just about anything going on in town outside of Facebook and Nextdoor.
wahern 5y ago
The NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have all adopted partisan baiting techniques to draw in subscribers. (IMO, they've done so in that order, with Washington Post the most extreme, and NY Times bringing up the rear but quickly closing the gap as they've cycled out their older reporters with younger ones the past few years.) Their actual news reporting has suffered considerably, though they're such large organizations with enough veteran journalists that they do still put out some good pieces somewhat regularly, especially relative to newer media and smaller media.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago

You could tell a similar story about vulture capital in many other industries. So it makes me wonder: what value to society do these practices provide? Would there be any great loss in making these sorts of actions illegal? (Of course, good luck distinguishing between genuine attempts to save failing businesses and vultures…)

toiletfuneral 5y ago
Yeah I’m deeply tired of every single human endeavor’s existence being solely judged on its ability to provide returns to shareholders. Wish we could just nationalize stuff that people like which doesn’t generate profit. I sort of used to think that was the point of the state but I live in the US where the government is just a entity to provide contracts to corporations.
zz865 5y ago
I think the point is these media companies are near-worthless, if vulture funds didn't buy them no one else would and they'd just fold.
- human_person 5y ago
  What do you mean by 'near-worthless'? A small radio station that provides connection, information and entertainment to a rural area and a handful of jobs for community members might be "worthless" in the sense that it wont create massive returns for an investor but that doesnt make it worthless to the community it is a part of. The problem is these vultures come in make false promises about supporting the station and then suck it dry. In the end the vultures walk away with a tidy profit and the community is worse off. Just because we cant quantify the value of something in terms of hard currency doesnt make it worthless.
  - haneefmubarak 5y ago
    I believe that by "near-worthless" they mean that a given company is hemorrhaging assets and basically about to fold. A business that continuously runs net negative has to close at some point without an external influx of capital, after all. The alleged theory goes that since without the help of some fund such a company is going to fold anyways, the fund can't really do much worse than the alternative, so might as well let them have a shot at repairing the business and rescuing it. Sometimes they're successful, sometimes they're not.

WalterBright 5y ago

One model that counter-intuitively may work is the Open Source model. For example, I'm the CEO of the D Language Foundation. I take no salary from it. Sometimes I'll get a paid gig for things like training or a special project. Most contributors are in the same situation. We do have corporate contributors. Their help enables us to have a staff of paid people, and defrays other costs like cloud fees. The web site has some affiliate Amazon ads for programming books and D swag, and we acknowledge our sponsors, but we don't have paid advertisers. The software we make does not present any ads or do any telemetry of any sort. And yet it all works, and has been for 20 years now. Simply because we like what we do for its own sake. Consider that for anyone wanting to start such a thing for local news, the barriers to entry are really, really low.

tlb 5y ago
Wikipedia makes a good open-source replacement for geopolitical news, just a little behind. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%932021) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80... gives a much clearer picture of what happened than all the newspaper coverage over the last 20 years.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Wikipedia is exceptionally good at providing an overview of large and complex stories, especially those without a group or interest advocating for a specific narrative. It does less well in other areas: - Covering corporate dealings of substantial companies, especially those which can either drive or suppress specific narratives. - Similarly, political stories of a similar nature, especially by powerful or oppressive regimes. - Generally, the "BLP problem", biographies of living persons. Here, Wikipedia tends to bend over backwards in not crossing live wires or contentious points, though it may do so where sufficiently credibly sourced references exist. Note that this is frequntly predicated on an indepndent press, both in the tradititional sense and in the sense of "independent of Wikipedia itself". BLP also suffers from the partisans / advocates challenge (as well as the opponents / enemies one). None of these problems are exclusive to Wikipedia, and they've long been an issue with both encyclopedias and newspapers. Commercial, advertising-supported newspapers have their own biases, but they've also long had an ancillary function of affording legal cover and protection to their journalists and publishers, a capability that a strictly volunteer effort would lack. Wikipedia's other weakness is in providing consistent and sufficient coverage of small and local concerns. I've noticed this in the case of Covid-19 coverage, something which the site does an excellent job of at large scale, whilst many individual country pages have badly outdated and inaccurate information. Filling in the holes and small details is something Wikipedia does quite unevenly. As a sole source of local small-town news concerning business, politics, crime, and culture, I suspect the Wikipedia approach would prove badly lacking. The emerging news landscape seems to manage with the big picture. It's small and local news that are most neglected.

xrd 5y ago

It is so crazy to me that Americans seem like the most patriotic people on the planet (but I'm American, so maybe I am missing things) BUT... ... given the choice of buying something local or from Amazon (that comes from China) if it costs $1 less, Americans will almost always go for the Chinese merchandise, or shop at Walmart to save a few bucks. .. given a choice between news that is written by locals, or a newspaper as described in the article, where they outsource the design work to the Phillipines, at least a large percentage of Americans will simply go with the better designed one, and never question the messenger. Americans are a very confused tribe, in my opinion, and I say that as one of them.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago
As a foreigner, who has lived in the US for ~9 years, I can say that I mostly admire the "sane" patriotic spirit that most Americans have ("not sane" would be the racist, xenophobic type, which I instead condemn). Your points about where money is spent still stands; but I don't think it makes Americans less patriotic. You might also be true that they are "a very confused tribe", but rest assured that most people in the world think the same about their people.
- xrd 5y ago
  That's reassuring to know we are all nuts! Thanks for that. ;)
snarf21 5y ago
Yeah, everyone wants dollar stores but forgets that they only exist because of exploiting foreign labor. If we made the same garbage here, it would cost a lot lot more. And eventually, this will be done via automation and the jobs will disappear over there too. We don't like to think about how other people are treated and have somehow convinced ourselves that we deserve to be treated better because they "don't have to do the crappy job". And this isn't just overseas. Look at the Nabisco and Kellogg strikes; I didn't see mass protesting going viral online and people refusing to buy those products. I'm sure people who know someone directly affected were more likely to boycott. It is sad that we are such a selfish species and have completely lost all empathy.

dillondoyle 5y ago

I used to buy ads on denverpost.com before Alden bought them. Then the site because the largest piece of hot garbage ever. I don't know who in the world would pay for ads on there anymore. any visitors they do have probably wouldn't even see your ad since there are like 4 layers of ads on top of each other, with multiple embedded auto play videos and outstream ads blowing up my laptop fan. PLUS they even fire inline ads on paywall impressions which makes them un viewable! Basically the opposite digital media approach as NyTimes and others who focus on high quality impressions and subscriber revenue. But people are still paying for impressions so I guess it works. * I personally like the Axios model of a high quality ad for high quality audience + they are trying to sell their own software for additional revenue.

toss1 5y ago

>>The model is simple: gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring out as much cash as possible. Yup typical MBA vampire business model, zero out all functions related to long term growth, organizational resiliency, or social capital, and just extract cash until the organization dies. Nevermind that the effect will corrode the very democracy that supports making their profits...