If you own a paper, and revenue starts dropping 10% YoY for multiple years then you are going to need to put in place changes to the business, finances, corpora

If you own a paper, and revenue starts dropping 10% YoY for multiple years then you are going to need to put in place changes to the business, finances, corporate structure that most people who owned newspapers do not want to do. In some cases, this has been forced due to high levels of debt. But even in those cases, some change in operation is usually required because something has changed quite significantly. So you try to sell your paper? Most corporate buyers don't want to buy a problem. Most PE funds don't want to buy a problem. Bond holders don't want to take control. The most likely buyer is a hedge fund that specialised in purchasing distressed assets. So it is the opposite of what you think: the hedge fund knows exactly what you know, that is why they are buying. The information in the decision to buy for a hedge fund is not the trajectory of the business but the price. You can buy a business in an industry that is failing, and still make money. Ofc, what journalists (outraged by someone coming in and telling them they have to earn their wage) forget is that this isn't easy work. Hedge funds that specialise in distressed assets are buying a problem...that is why someone is selling it to them. It is is hard to generalise but from what I have seen: newspapers are still generating cash, there is a lot of scope to cut back on staff (to put it bluntly, newspapers were a monopoly business so they ran tons of staff doing things no-one read, they were a sinecure/tenure type job), digital strategy at most papers is very bad because managers worried about hurting offline, fully digital has a totally different staff model (a website is a totally different experience to a paper, all the views are concentrated in that top 10% of stories...no-one is going to hunt through/scroll down for your gardening guy), and there is scope for restructuring with debt holders. The business is declining but nowhere near as fast as other industries affected by online. Declining businesses like that are usually mispriced by the market who give them a control discount (and tbh, everyone just wants growth...look at Dillard's, they bought back effectively all their stock and the share price went up 600% in a month, people want to buy potential profit tomorrow rather than actual profit today), so taking the business private is usually very profitable.