Billionaires battle for Tribune Publishing

GARY MARX and David Jackson, two veteran investigative reporters at the , spent most of last year seeking potential buyers who might save their newspaper from Alden Global Capital, a New York hedge fund. “We need a civic-minded local owner or group of owners,” they wrote in January 2020 in an opinion article in the. The alternative was a ghost version of the paper, they warned. “Illinois’s most vulnerable people would lose a powerful guardian, its corrupt politicians would be freer to exploit and plunder, and this prairie metropolis would lose the common forum that binds together and lifts its citizens.”With no saviour in sight, Messrs Marx and Jackson have now left the paper. In mid-February their nightmare came closer to reality when the board of Tribune Publishing, which owns the and eight other local rags, accepted a $630m bid by Alden for the 68% of the company it did not already own. But on March 27th, in a Pulitzer-worthy twist, Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire, said he would join forces with Stewart Bainum, a hotel tycoon in Maryland, to buy Tribune Publishing for $650m. “I don’t want to see another newspaper that has a chance to increase the amount of truth being told to the American people going down the drain,” Mr Wyss told the.