The Washington Post, which was saved by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2013, is cheering on the offer by Stewart Bainum Jr. to but Tribune Publishing:

Bainum hopes to offer $650 million for Tribune Publishing Co.

By Elahe Izadi and Sarah Ellison | March 24, 2021 | 6:00 PM EDT

Maryland business executive Stewart Bainum Jr. wants to purchase Tribune Publishing Co. for $650 million — 10 times the amount he agreed last month to pay for one of its newspapers, the Baltimore Sun.

It’s an effort to edge out an already agreed-upon $630 million offer for Tribune from Alden Global Capital, an investment fund known for acquiring and slashing newspaper operations.

Details of Bainum’s plans surfaced in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing submitted Tuesday.

It once seemed as if the Alden deal was all but wrapped up; in Tuesday’s filing, the board recommended that shareholders approve Alden’s offer but also released Banium from a confidentiality agreement he made to negotiate to buy the Baltimore Sun so that he can talk with potential investors about going in together on a counter-offer for all of Tribune.

Alden is a hedge fund that likes to buy up newspapers, cut them to the bone, and make a profit by selling off their real property. But it should be noted that it doesn’t have to be a hedge fund to do that stuff.

Philadelphia Inquirer to sell printing facility, lay off 500 plant employees in bid for long-term economic stability

Proceeds from the sale of the plant will be used to enhance severance packages for laid-off employees beyond the company’s obligations under union contracts.

by Andrew Maykuth and Juliana Feliciano Reyes | Updated: October 9, 2020

The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News Printing Plant in Conshohocken.JESSICA Griffin / Philadelphia InquirerStaff Photographer

The Philadelphia Inquirer will close its sprawling Montgomery County printing plant and shift production of its newspapers to a New Jersey contractor. The cost-cutting move will put as many as 500 employees out of work, but is aimed at ensuring the survival of the media company as consumers turn to digital platforms for their news.The company on Friday told employees that it plans to close and sell the Schuylkill Printing Plant in Upper Merion Township, perhaps by the end of the year. The Inquirer is negotiating with a buyer for the 45-acre River Road property, which includes a 674,000-square-foot manufacturing facility that opened in 1992. The buyer’s identity and plans were not disclosed.

“While the sale is not yet final, we recognize how deeply unsettling and distressing this is to employees at the printing plant,” Lisa Hughes, The Inquirer’s publisher and chief executive officer, said in an internal memo Friday to employees.

“They have served our readers tirelessly, with dedication and devotion to the craft,” Hughes said. “Many of them have spent decades with the company — and all performed their jobs valiantly when the pandemic arrived.”

They may have served valiantly, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to get canned.

Look at that photo, which you can enlarge by clicking on it. There are a lot of expensive-looking vehicles in that parking lot, the parking lot of a building filled with, as the left like to say, people with good paying union jobs. That the Inquirer is now owned by the Philadelphia Foundation, a non-profit ‘public benefit’ corporation. Gerry Lenfest, a billionaire who liked to give away his money, bought out the Inquirer and its companion tabloid, the Daily News, in 2014. While Mr Bezos paid 250 million for The Washington Post, the amount Mr Lenfest had to spend was a fraction of that. Mr Lenfest then turned around and donated the Inquirer to the non-profit.

But even non-profits have to pay the bills, and thus the printing plant got sold, and all of those “valiant” employees, with their good-paying union jobs, got pink slips. The $299.5 million state-of-the-art printing plant that the Inquirer had built in 1992, just sold for $37 million. In one of the bigger ironies, the time capsule buried at the plant in 1992, and scheduled to be opened in 2092, was instead opened on Friday.

It was sometime around 15 years ago, and perhaps longer, that I read an article which pointed out that it would have been less expensive for The New York Times to buy and provide each of its print subscribers with a Kindle, and send distribute the paper online instead, than it was to print the thing. Today, I get my subscribed newspapers — and I admit to liking newspapers far more than broadcast media sources — on my desktop, on my iPad, and on my iPhone.

Before I retired, I used to stop at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe on the way to the plant. I got my coffee, and picked up a copy of the Inquirer, to take to work. Some of the guys used to combitch that they’d have preferred the Allentown Morning Call, as it was closer to local news for them, but I was paying for it, so I got to choose. At any rate, there were many, many times in which, in the sports section, there would be a notice, “This game ended too late for inclusion in this edition.”^[1]“Combitch” is a Picoism, not a typo. You should be able to figure out the etymology on your own.

That is the problem with print newspapers: the news is not always that new. Events happen quickly, and print newspapers are hours old before people ever get to read them. Online, corrections and updates can, and are, made frequently.

Why do I appreciate newspapers? Being mostly deaf, it is far easier for me to read the news than listen to it. More, the broadcast/cablecast media give us just the bare bones, not the meat of the stories, and their biases are far more blatant. Even with the biases of the #woke in the newsrooms, the longer treatment of print medium stories usually lets the truth get out.

The old Lexington Herald-Leader building, on Midland Avenue. Now sold, the building logo has been removed.

I was, about the time that Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, a paperboy for the old Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader. Alas! The current merged paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, now part of the bankrupt McClatchy company, outsourced its own printing to a plant near Louisville in 2016, ceased issuing a Saturday edition in 2019, which meant the end of printing Friday night high school sports stories, and recently sold their own building on Midland Avenue to the Fayette County schools.

And let’s be honest: the print editions of virtually every major, and mid-sized, newspaper in this country, are horrible. The physical size has been reduced, even in as august a paper as The Wall Street Journal, and newsroom staffs have been cut not just to the bare bones, but into the bone as well.

It’s time to simply end the print editions. As much as some people will hate to see them go, they are dying anyway. For newspapers to have any chance to become profitable, they have to cease being newspapers, and adapt to the digital, internet model. No matter how much they try to modernize, newspapers are still 18^th century technology, and the 18^th century ended a long time ago.