Could the local news crisis get any worse? Look at Scranton.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Chris Kelly writes a twice-weekly column for the Scranton Times-Tribune, his place of work for the past 27 years. For all but a few months of that tenure, his bosses have been the Lynett family, descendants of E.J. Lynett, a breaker boy in the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania who went on to buy the newspaper in 1895. Over four generations, the Lynetts reminded staffers and their community alike of their commitment to both local journalism and local ownership.

When Kelly and some colleagues attended a journalism awards event in Harrisburg, he heard the gripes of staffers from the Reading Eagle, which had been acquired by MediaNews Group (MNG), a cost-cutting newspaper chain owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital. “We all said to each other, ‘Thank god the Lynetts own us, because they’d never sell us to a hedge fund,’” recalls Kelly.

This past summer, the Lynetts did precisely that. On Aug. 31, staffers at the Times-Tribune gathered for a Q&A with James Lewandowski, CEO of Times-Shamrock Communications, the Lynett family’s media company. Those staffers had just learned that the company had new owners: Alden/MNG had bought the Scranton Times-Tribune along with three other regional dailies — the Citizens’ Voice (Wilkes-Barre), the Standard-Speaker (Hazleton) and the Republican Herald (Pottsville) — and other assets. Times-Shamrock held on to its radio and outdoor advertising businesses.

No one from Alden, however, was in attendance to answer questions. When he fielded inquiries about the paper’s future, Lewandowski said, “You’ll have to ask them.” Kelly responded, “Who is them?” Still seething at the turn of events, the columnist recounts: “I said, ‘You know, when we heard about the sale being possible, I said please don’t let it be a hedge fund. And you didn’t just sell it to a hedge fund, you sold it to the worst one.’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/14/alden-pennsylvania-scranton-family-newspaper/

[moniss]

1. I've read foreign news sources

that have stories about something that happened in this or that US city and the local papers/TV in those cities never mentioned it. About 10 years ago or so I was in North Dakota and I picked up a paper and read an article about a major bust having gone down in Minnesota and Wisconsin of companies treating migrant field workers like prisoners and the shell companies that supposedly "controlled and supplied" the workers. So naturally I thought it would be big news in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Milwaukee Journal. Zero, zip, nada. Prosecutions moved forward and still nothing in the Milwaukee Journal. Finally when another ring got busted a few years later they actually covered that one but only in a slight way and local TV not much at all.

That small paper out in Kansas that was covering local cop/civic corruption and got raided is one of the last examples I know about of a group doing it right. I support alternative weekly papers as well. Some of the best digging on corporate polluters and crooks is done by those alternative publications.