Who Owns the Media: Digital First Media
Digital First Media (Alden Global) 🐔🐔🐔
Capitulation Rank: Capitulating
Category: Newspaper & Publishing
Market Cap: Privately held
President Randall Smith
During the 2020 presidential election, Digital First Media’s co-founder Randall Smith and his wife gave $100,000 to the Trump Victory Fund. At the time, Democrats in Congress were weighing legislation to make hedge funds more transparent about their operations and investors, something Smith and the newspaper conglomerate’s leadership opposed.
We do know that Digital First Media has a reputation for acquiring struggling local newspapers and stripping them of their parts. This process involves wholesale layoffs of newsroom staff, which company executives rationalize by spouting finance-industry euphemisms like “synergies” and “economies of scale.”
Smith controls the privately held hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which in turn owns DFM. Many of the newspapers DFM owns had endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. But the conglomerate decided in 2022 to no longer to endorse candidates, forbidding many of these same publications from endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024.
Alden Global’s money is secreted away in tax havens including the Cayman Islands. While the company’s website remains fairly opaque about internal policies, the map in Digital First Media’s “Communities” page is in sync with the Trump administration: It lists the Gulf of México as the “Gulf of America” and the Sea of Cortéz as the “Gulf of California.”
- What It Owns:
Private-equity fund Alden Global Capital owns Digital First Media and Tribune Publishing, making it the second-largest newspaper company in the United States. Tribune Publishing’s holdings include more than 100 dailies, including the Barrington Courier-Review (Illinois), Boca Times (Florida), Winnetka Talk (Illinois), Yardley News and Ypsilanti Courier (Michigan). Alden Global Capital also owns businesses involved in commercial real-estate sales and brokering through its subsidiaries Praxis Commercial and Twenty Lake Holdings. Alden also owns AdTaxi and Paradise Post Printing.