Friday, May 01, 2020

Alden Capital wants to be saved from itself
and from its hypocrisy, schadenfreude and petard-hoisting

Ben Smith, formerly of ButtFeet and now the New York Times, notes that Alden Capital head Heath Freeman wants Facebook and Google to pay it more for the news they buy from it.

There's several problems here, per the second line of the header.

Above all with the Denver Post, anybody who knows anything about the media, about Alden Capital and how the Venn diagrams of "Alden" plus "media ownership" and "Alden" plus "news writing" are nowhere near the same, know that Alden really is producing almost no news. That's because, even though its newspapers are generally profitable, it's cut them to the bone and beyond, even worse than Craphouse (excuse me, New Gannett), and only to milk them because other things owned by Alden suck. So, that's the petard hoisting.

The hypocrisy is, of course, that were Alden to get paid more, it wouldn't reinvest it in its newspapers. See above.

The schadenfreude is the Alden connection to how newspapers got here in the first place.

In the middle 1990s, when the Internet started looming on the horizon, major papers and the AP started wondering how this might affect them. Well, the AP board of directors decided that the "TV model" showed that advertising would be fine and no online subscriptions needed. This, of course, ignored that pay cable channels existed already then and had for at least 15 years before that.

Now, here's the specifics of the schadenfreude.

Dean Singleton was chair of the board of AP at the time.

Deano, as I like to call him, as many know, owned Media News, or Media Snooze, an early "Chainsaw Al" guy. More on that in a moment. Media Snooze, as part of its growth + woes, became part of Digital First Media, or as it's known here, Dead Fucking Media. The whole conglomerate became part of Alden.

There's your schadenfreude.

So, go fuck yourself, Heath.

And, the additional bit of hypocrisy? "Chainsaw Al" Deano criticizing Alden almost exactly a year ago.

No comments: