Opinion | After 128 years, a family-run Scranton newspaper sells to a hedge fund

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.’”

That’s a fair summation of Alden’s reputation. The company owns the second-largest chain of newspapers in the country, with 68 dailies and more than 100 weeklies, a brand assortment that includes the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel. En route to that portfolio, Alden has slashed payrolls, consolidated journalistic beats, closed offices and otherwise squeezed its properties in a scratch-and-claw pursuit of cash flow. “I never read a good word about their management philosophy,” says 80-year-old Scranton publisher emeritus George V. Lynett.

William Goodspeed, board chair for Times-Shamrock, says that members of the board and the Lynett family were “aware that Alden had a reputation of being extremely aggressive in cutting costs.” But family members in favor of the sale, he said in an interview, acknowledged the sagging financial outlook of the newspapers and faced a choice between bleeding the company “down to the last dollar of profit and into losses” and trying to “sell it to someone who sees value in it and can run it longer and probably more aggressively.” One branch of the family, however, had opposed unloading the properties to Alden and issued a statement at the time of the sale explaining why: “Alden does not reflect the business principles we feel are consistent with the stewardship of any newspaper,” read the statement from George V. Lynett and his four children.

Advertisement

In the context of local news, stewardship itself is becoming a quaint ideal. Over the past two decades, the newspaper industry has suffered a steep decline that has been well-covered by a despairing media. Since 2005, according to a recent tally, the country has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers and almost two-thirds of newspaper journalists; more than half of daily newspapers are owned by the 10 top newspaper chains.

The Times-Tribune and its sister papers, however, weren’t ready to become a statistic. They were healthy properties with respectable operating margins, especially by the standards of modern newspapering. “These are not papers that were, like, destitute or going into the sh---er,” says Don Farley, former president and publisher of Times-Shamrock Communications.

Even so, Alden submitted “the only firm bid we had — that we could count on,” recalls Goodspeed. That’s grim. “It’s a very clear reflection that newspapers in general and local newspapers specifically are not held in high financial regard,” he says. What happened in Scranton shows that, as far as things have fallen with regard to local news, there is still further to go — and that shoring up the industry is likely to require the full mix of public-policy and philanthropic possibilities.

Any such movement will almost certainly be too late for the northeastern Pennsylvania newspapers. Together, they serve a population of 570,000 in the Scranton and Wilkes-Barre region — a population that deserves strong local reporting. It’ll now get far less of that. What it will get, instead, is a newspaper chain that has severed the ethic of public service from the business of newspapering, a breakdown that has already happened in altogether too many American communities and that is proceeding apace.

“It’s over,” says Kelly.

The civic cost of newspaper savings

When companies buy newspapers, they typically like to ballyhoo their lofty ambitions and solemn responsibilities. No such sentiments were to be found in the Aug. 31 story by the Scranton Times-Tribune on the transaction: “Attempts to reach MediaNews Group representatives were unsuccessful,” read the piece.

Silence was not an indicator of inaction, however. Alden was moving swiftly to Aldenize its new properties. In his first email to former Times-Shamrock staffers — one day after the August announcement — MediaNews Group Regional Publisher Edward S. Condra blamed “big tech aggregators” for the financial pressures bearing on newspapers. “As a result, we will need to offer voluntary buyouts in order to offset declining revenues,” wrote Condra. The timeline turned out to be immediate. Just after midnight on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, union leaders at three former Times-Shamrock papers received an email briefing them on the buyout, which swept out about one-quarter of the roughly 40 staffers in the Times-Tribune newsroom — already down from around 90 in the late 1990s.

There’s a cold logic behind the hurry-up offense that Alden orchestrates upon acquiring outfits such as the Times-Tribune. Every asset in its portfolio — print newspapers, printing facilities, digital subscriptions, real estate — is surveilled with an eye toward generating cash. The sooner that cash gets plowed into high-risk, high-reward investments, the better.

Advertisement

Accordingly, since the sale just a few months ago, Alden has done the following:

• Ended the employment of those at the Times-Tribune who accepted the buyout within 17 days of receiving their offers — Olympic speed in the world of media HR.
• Hustled to put up for sale the real estate hosting its newsrooms in Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton and Pottsville — all of which were included in the sale. It didn’t buy the majestic Scranton Times building, whose newsroom emptied out by the end of November. “Most newsroom staff will work remotely from home. A designated few will work at a new office,” reads a memo from Executive Editor Larry Holeva. It added: “MediaNews Group’s philosophy is to have more people work remotely the majority of the time.” With philosophical savings, of course, on office space.
• Outsourced at least some customer service tasks to a call center in the Philippines.

All this strip-mining comes with consequences. The buyouts, for instance, cleared out opinion staffers Pat McKenna and James Haggerty — and out the door with them went many of the daily editorials most relevant to Times-Tribune subscribers. Patrick Joyce, a resident of Moosic, Pa., noticed a reduction in “home crafted” editorials following the sale and wrote a letter to the editor voicing his concerns. After it was rejected for publication, he posted it on Facebook: “This ‘new and improved’ version of the Times-Tribune editorial page is a vivid victim of the greed corporate raiders foist on us readers who pay a premium for local news and expect a premium product in return,” Joyce wrote.

That careful reader wasn’t imagining things. For example: Over one week in late July and early August — before the sale — the Times-Tribune tallied eight local/state editorials, on topics ranging from the contract for the Scranton Police Department to Lackawanna County’s record in protecting vulnerable children to Pennsylvania’s use of recycled materials for road construction. Over one week in late October and early November — after the sale — there were two local/state editorials, if you count the de rigueur get-out-and-vote piece. The rest focused on national topics and were republished from other outlets.

Which is to say, Alden swapped out customized local stuff for commoditized national stuff. Alden’s propensity to cut newsroom staff and local content has been well documented.

The idea is to propagate a simulacrum — a newspaper bearing the trappings of its former self, if not the vim and substance. One common cost-savings, for instance, is to consolidate beats by forcing the onetime cops reporter, say, to also take on courts and social services. It’s this scrimping that concerns the Scranton mayor, Paige Gebhardt Cognetti, who arguably owes her current work to the local paper.

A former Obama administration appointee in the Treasury Department, Cognetti moved to Scranton from New York and took to reading the Times-Tribune. She alighted on the work of Sarah Hofius Hall, the Times-Tribune’s longtime education reporter, who in the mid-2010s exposed dysfunction in the finances of the Scranton public schools — coverage that helped convince Cognetti to seek an appointment to the school board. In a campaign that defied the city’s Democratic establishment, she was elected mayor in November 2019.

“Reading the coverage of the Scranton Times unknowingly set me on this path,” says Cognetti, who says it’s important to have a single reporter covering education. “City government, county government, business development — education: You can’t have one reporter covering all these things.” Hall has been asked to pitch in temporarily on features coverage, according to informed sources.

In response to a set of questions regarding these matters, Alden sent links suggesting that it’s not alone in its quest to cut newsrooms — including a Wall Street Journal story about “ghost newspapers” that have no staff reporters. The response also seized on staff reductions underway at The Post: “In particular, we agree with comments from The Washington Post’s CEO regarding the issues facing the news industry that: ‘The urgent need to invest in our top growth priorities brought us to the difficult conclusion that we need to adjust our cost structure now,’ ‘ … buyouts are being offered in hopes of 'averting more difficult actions such as layoffs — a situation we are united in trying to avoid.’”

The end of the line for a family business

In mid-August, the Times-Tribune newsroom caught wind that the Times-Shamrock folks had either closed a sale of the newspaper or were nearing that stage. So they checked it out. Management responded that the story was “untrue,” according to Times-Tribune reporter Borys Krawczeniuk.

In part because of that exchange, staffers were ill-prepared for the news that arrived later that month. According to Ed Pikulski, director of interactive media for Times-Shamrock, ownership held meetings with staffers at least once a year to deliver updates on the business. “The mantra was, ‘This is a company that is profitable and we are committed to community journalism,’” recalls Pikulski. “There was never any hint that we were a company on anything other than a strong financial footing.”

The message from the top sank in. “When you’ve owned it for over 100 years and said you’re committed to local ownership, people tend to believe you,” says McKenna. “I was dismayed, to be honest.”

Employees at Times-Shamrock often dedicated their entire careers to the company, and perhaps expected a measure of loyalty in return. Among those who had started at the company before or soon after graduating from college were McKenna (45 years of employment); Farley (38); Pikulski (38 and counting); and Hall (17 and counting). And members of the Lynett clan had long kept a commitment to the community, playing leadership roles for the United Way, funding local scholarships for employees and throwing an elaborate block party each year to turn on the holiday lights.

Familial bonhomie could not, however, fend off the 21st-century newspaper economy. Like other newspapers, the Times-Tribune has suffered through brutal dropoffs in print subscriptions — Sunday circulation, for instance, dropped from nearly 77,000 in 2000 to fewer than 25,000 in 2023 — and display advertising, with digital subscriptions doing too little to bridge the deficit.

The Great Recession landed hard at the Times-Tribune, coming amid declining subscriptions for its print product. It also happened to coincide with the ascension of the fourth generation of Lynetts to top management roles. The handoff was memorialized in a mural at the Scranton Times building:

“My cousins and I took over on Jan. 1, 2009, and within weeks we were doing the first layoffs in the company’s history,” says Scott Lynett, one of the fourth generation CEOs of Times-Shamrock.

Like other newspaper leaders in that decade, the new managers tried to meet the decline with staff reductions and expense-shrinking measures. By 2018, the Lynetts decided that enough was enough, and announced a plan to replace family executives with outsiders — a prelude to the eventual exploration of a sale.

Expressions of interest came from three parties, according to Goodspeed.

“It was a robust sale process,” says Sara April of the media merger-and-acquisition firm Dirks, Van Essen & April, which brokered the transaction.

Advertisement

This past spring, Alden appeared to have the most promising bid for the newspapers. A state of alarm gripped George V. Lynett’s branch of the family, which collaborated on a letter to other stakeholders. “Everybody knew what kind of operator Alden was and if they didn’t, we let them know,” says Lynett’s son, George Lynett Jr., summing up the gist: “Hopefully, you’re doing your research and if you don’t — Google them. They’re awful operators.”

There was no response, he says.

The sale to Alden cleared the Lynett family by a 3 to 1 vote. The decision rested with the four Lynett siblings from the third generation, who took over the company in the 1960s and stepped back from day-to-day management in the 2000s. George V. Lynett says that, in August, he was presented with a document to authorize the transaction with Alden; he declined to sign it. His siblings — Edward Lynett, William Lynett and Cecelia Lynett Haggerty — favored the sale. George V. Lynett sat for an extended interview regarding his reasons for opposing the sale; Edward Lynett and William Lynett declined requests for comment, including visits to their Scranton-area homes. Goodspeed says he was authorized to speak on behalf of the three approving shareholders.

The family’s rationale for selling to Alden was that it had already shrunk the papers to an insert of their former selves — and that it lacked the stomach for more pain. “Being a community newspaper, these are people who’ve worked with us for decades. We went to the weddings, to the funerals — we were at the christenings,” says Scott Lynett, one of the fourth-generation CEOs. Goodspeed says that MediaNews Group would be “better suited” to do the next round of cuts, “and ultimately a lot of the papers would survive longer than they would have otherwise. It was a combination of financial reasoning and also emotional reasoning.” It was also unpersuasive reasoning: The Lynett family had proved capable of shrinking its enterprises in response to business imperatives. The suggestion that Alden would be an appropriate owner just because the properties would require further cutbacks marks a cynical betrayal of the family’s approach to newspapering. “We would have done it more humanely and more effectively. We know our employees,” says George V. Lynett.

When asked why the family sold the papers, Farley responds, “Money. It’s as simple as that.”

George V. Lynett, who opposed the deal with Alden, has a more nuanced explanation: “The sale was driven by 15 years of a continuing drumbeat of reduced revenue. No matter what we and our people, our employees, tried, we couldn’t reverse that. And that becomes frustrating.”

No fifth generation

Newspapers stir passions among readers as well as staffers and owners. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the sale to Alden would cause some discomfort among the Lynetts. “We’re not as tight any longer. There’s not a lot of happiness over the sale,” says George Lynett Jr., when asked about the decision’s impact on the family.

The Lynetts aren’t outliers. Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a top researcher on local news, says she has seen a dozen or more instances in which family newspaper companies unravel when the fourth generation takes control. “Most small businesses rarely survive past the third generation, and the future outlook for these papers is so diminished that the fourth generation wants to sell while it still can,” says Abernathy.

That outlook, even from just five or six years ago, looks dim. April says that her merger-and-acquisition firm did 55 transactions between 2017 and 2019, 94 percent of which involved profitable local news operations. Since 2020, the firm has completed 66 transactions, only 39 percent of which involved profitable local news operations. Still, says April, local buyers in several markets have snapped up news properties and are making a go of it.

Steven Waldman, president of Rebuild Local News, wrote an article for Poynter after the Times-Shamrock sale advocating for several philanthropic and public-policy measures to stave off future Scranton meltdowns, including tax incentives to promote local buyers for newspapers on the block. Jurisdictions that care about their civic health need to wake up. “What we have in Pennsylvania is cannibalism — one part of the local news industry eating another,” Waldman wrote.

For now, northeastern Pennsylvanians will have to live with the repercussions. In November, George V. Lynett dropped in on the Scranton Times headquarters and found Pikulski loading his car with the office accumulations of 38 years. Unlike many of his colleagues, Pikulski still had a job — but from now on, he’d be doing it at home.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” said Lynett. There was a long pause before he added: “This didn’t happen the way I wanted it to happen.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLyxtc2ipqerX2d9c3%2BOamloaWRkrq2wxKdkqZ2eo8C6uNWapaKZXaiws63NraanZZaWuqq42Galnq%2Bjpa6xsdFo