Billionaires battle for Tribune Publishing

GARY MARX and David Jackson, two veteran investigative reporters at the Chicago Tribune, 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 New York Times. 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.”