Do American local journalists, who in the last century were able to lead a comfortable life, still exist today? During the Christmas of 2019, Prudential Plaza, then home of the Chicago Tribune, was brightly lit as I looked from the windows of the Chicago Art Institute. The Tribune moved out of Prudential Plaza three months ago because it couldn't pay the rent. (Photo/Du Zhihang)

Du Zhihang is an international news reporter with Caixin Media 

April,14, 2021

When I was an exchange student at Columbia University in 2016, I took a course called Journalism and Public Society in the School of Journalism. The first class was packed, with enrollment exceeding the limit of 40 students. Yet, after the first class, 30 people canceled their registration and left.

Many students who were “infatuated” with journalism was obviously deterred by this course’s relatively slow-spoken professor, Michael Schudson, who was turning 70, and who began the course with the old days of American journalism a hundred years ago.

In this class of only 10 students, Professor Schudson took us back to the glory days of American journalism, facilitated our chat with a number of veteran journalists, including Sam Freedman, a pioneer of the New York Times' coverage of gay rights in the 1980s, And Walter Robinson and Sacha Pfeiffer, the investigative reporters at the Boston Globe who exposed Catholic churches’ sexual abuse of children in the 1990s, and who inspired the film Spotlight.

"We need news," Schudson sounded lonesome, "News makes society better." In 2016, the American newspaper industry was at a low point. "Journalist" had been rated by CareerCast as the career with the worst prospects for three consecutive years. With the rise of the Internet and social media, newspaper revenues declined sharply, and "journalism is dead" could be heard everywhere.

Quality, professional journalism is important for social progress, but why is journalism still on the wane? For this paradox, even Schudson was unable to give a clear answer.

Five years on, US journalism seems still alive, with national newspapers such as the New York Times regained vitality through digital subscriptions. Still, life is tough for local newspapers in the United States. The post-COVID-19 recession has left indebted local newspapers struggling.

In January 2021, it was announced that the venerable Chicago Tribune, along with the Baltimore Sun and several other major U.S. local newspapers, would be acquired by the infamous hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Those papers faced widespread layoffs, land sales and outsourced operations.

Meanwhile, Stewart Bainum, a Maryland hospitality magnate sympathetic to the Tribune, is joining forces with two other tycoons to outbid Alden Global Capital, in a fight to "reclaim" a corner of US local journalism.

The paradox that "journalism is important, but journalism is in decline" seems to be back. Who will win, hedge funds or sympathetic rich people? Do American local journalists, who in the last century were able to lead a comfortable life, still exist today? How should the watchdog of urban politics survive?

The battle for Tribune Publishing Group

In January 2021, after the financial crisis, digital transformation, and the pandemic, Tribune Publishing, the indebted publishing group behind the Tribune, is once again in deep financial trouble. Alden Global Capital, Tribune's largest shareholder, offered $635m to buyout the entire group, which includes eight local newspapers.

Alden Global Capital is notorious to US press. It has been accused of buying up failing newspapers, "sucking" them dry and destroying them by selling off their assets. The hedge fund, for example, slashed staff after acquiring the Denver Post and allegedly diverted millions of news profits to completely unrelated businesses.

News of the buyout worries people at the Chicago Tribune. Two Tribune reporters said in an opinion piece at New York Times on January 19th that the deal would leave only a "ghost" of the Tribune and greatly reduce the role of policing corrupt politicians in Chicago.

As the Tribune's reporters struggled to make their voices heard, they also tried hard to find an alternative buyer to help the paper escape the clutters of hedge funds. On March 14^th, Stewart Bainum, a Maryland hotel magnate, stepped into the spotlight, saying he sympathized with local journalism and would bid to buy by Tribune Publishing.

Stewart Bainum initially planned to buy the Baltimore Sun, a newspaper owned by Tribune Publishing Group. He planned to turn it over to a non-profit after the paper stands on its feet again. After Alden Global Capital raised its bid, Stewart Bainum decided to buy the entire publishing group.

Yet the Alden Global Capital acquisition process was still moving forward. On Feb. 16, Tribune said it had accepted an offer from Alden Global Capital. On March 23rd Tribune's board reached an agreement on the buyout, which will allow Alden Global Capital to own the Tribune and other newspapers if Stewart Bainum, the hotel owner, failed to offer a higher price.

It would be hard for Stewart Bainum, the hotel tycoon, to come up with $635m to fend off the hedge fund on his own. Plus, Alden Global Capital is Tribune Publishing's largest shareholder. Alden controls three of the seven board members at Tribune Publishing. It’s almost like one buying out oneself.

The public almost lost their hope, when new hope appeared. On March 26^th, Hansjörg Wyss, a medical-device giant, announced that it had joined Mr. Bainum's camp. Three days later, another big name came in - Mason Slaine, a former Tribune shareholder, offered to raise the bid by $100m.

According to the New York Times, Hansjörg Wyss, who was a journalist as a young man, provided U.S. sports news for papers in Switzerland when studied in the United States. Still passionate about journalism, Wyss happened to read the plea from a Tribune reporter. Wyss says that if he gets to run the Tribune, the paper would thrive again.

On April 4, Stewart Bainum and others offered $680 million ($45 million more than Alden Global Capital offered) to buy Tribune Publishing Group.

Tribune's board has yet to vote, and Alden Global Capital has yet to offer a higher price. The fate of the Tribune is still shrouded in mystery.

America's troubled news industry

Since the global financial crisis, Tribune Publishing Group has been troubled and changed ownership several times. In December 2008, Tribune Co., the former version of Tribune Publishing Group, filed bankruptcy chapter 11 amid collapsing advertising revenue and a shortage of cash, according to a timeline compiled by the Chicago Tribune. The company added a new board in December 2012 after a four-year restructuring.

In its heyday at the end of the last century, the Tribune had 11 foreign correspondents, and the number of foreign correspondents is often an indicator of a newspaper's strength. By 2010, however, there is no foreign correspondents at Tribune, and the paper relied on the international news provided by the Los Angeles Times.

The Tribune was also close to being bought by a rival publisher. In April 2016, Tribune's closest rival, Gannett, which owns USA Today, offered to buy Tribune for $815 million, but the deal fell through.

After the outbreak of COVID-19, Tribune Publishing Group was once again in crisis. In April 2020, the group announced that it would lay off some employees for one week each month, from May to July. In January 2021, the Chicago Tribune announced that it was moving out of Prudential Plaza, its downtown work place, back to the Freedom Center printing and distribution building. Prudential Plaza has brought Tribune to the court for unpaid rent. The Tribune estimates that revenues will fall by 24 % in 2020 and by another 10 % in 2021.

The Tribune's experience reflects the fate of many other local newspapers in America. Since 2000, with the rise of the Internet, the traditional news industry in the United States is no longer the only source of news for people, and newspapers’ advertising revenue has also been diverted to other media.

The US newspaper industry has gone through dramatic chang, and the number of news jobs in the US declined by nearly half from 2004 to 2018, according to a Pew Research study. Local media have had a particularly hard time, with more than 2,100 US local newspapers disappearing since 2004, according to a study by the University of North Carolina's School of Media and Journalism.

The outbreak of COVID-19 was a fatal blow to the declining American newspaper industry. According to the New York Times' statistics at the end of May 2020, 37,000 U.S. news media employees had been laid off, furloughed or reduced in salary since the beginning of COVID-19.

Entering 2021, the jinx for journalists continues, and even does for the larger media. On February 11^th, Bloomberg laid off nearly 100 employees. On March 9, less than a few weeks after the Huffington Post was acquired by BuzzFeed News, 47 of its employees were fired.

Looking over downtown Chicago, Prudential Plaza, the former home of the Tribune, was nestled among handsome buildings. (Photo/Du Zhihang)

The latest answer to the paradox

The decline of the US newspaper industry, particularly local newspapers, seems certain. Does that mean journalism really doesn't matter anymore? Five years after taking Journalism and Public Society, I turned again to Professor Schudson for answers.

Professor Schudson, 74, still teaches the same course at Columbia's Journalism School. He has published several more books in the past few years, including one called Journalism: Why it Matters.

Professor Schudson accepted the reality of local newspapers’ disappearance, describing many of them as “local gossip”, a “feel good” journalism. As he pointed out it's not investigative journalism or "accountability journalism" -- it's not about informing people about the wider world.

Most small newspapers have never had a State reporter, let alone a foreign correspondent, says Professor Schudson, and the papers didn’t work very hard. "When the tabloids are gone, people lose something, but not much in the sense of  reporting."

The Tribune, however, is much bigger than the tabloids. It is the largest newspaper in Illinois and has won 27 Pulitzer Prizes since it was founded in 1847.

" Chicago  is the 3rd largest city in the United States. The Tribune has been its highest circulation newspaper for a very long time, "Professor Schudson said." Its circulation size in 2019 is  238,000, on a par with the Boston Globe, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Washington Post. It is by no mean a small operation. "

"And it would be a devastating blow to Chicago and to the state of Illinois to have it sold to a hedge fund. The record of hedge fund owners of newspapers is bad. They cut costs, they cut jobs, and they have not the slightest interest in the public service that newspapers can provide. "

The fate of the Tribune has yet to be determined. Reporters lamented that if bought by hedge funds, the Tribune would only have a ghost version of it— “a newspaper that can no longer carry out its essential watchdog mission. 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."

Journalism is in crisis, but news still matters. Professor Schudson said in Journalism: Why It Matters that people need news because it can make people care about each other and connect people in a community, a city or a country. News also help people understand current events and keeps us in sync with the society. Finally, news exposes the dark side of the society and it shout out to those corrupted: "We're watching you! "

Over the past 100 years, the medium of news has changed, from paper to television, from telegraph to the Internet, but journalism has survived after each metamorphosis. Journalism should continue to exist as long as the society needs it. However, as the medium of news changes rapidly, it will continue to be an important task for American newspapers to keep up with the pace of evolvement of the medium.

Hopefully more students will stay in this semester’s Journalism and Public Life.

(My good friend Zhao Zhijiang contributed to this article.)