David Hoffmann, the self-made billionaire who recently took over as chairman of struggling Lee Enterprises, started sketching out a vision for the newspaper chain’s largest metro daily, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, during an interview on Feb. 5.
He pledged to restore the Post and other Lee papers to profitability and mused about cutting print editions to three per week.
He said layoffs is “a bad, bad, bad word” and stressed the importance of retaining “great journalists.”
And he promised to correct what he sees as the Post’s left-leaning bias.
The most frustrating thing for Post editors and reporters: Hoffmann discussed his ideas not with them directly, but on stage at an event organized by the St. Louis Business Journal, a publication that competes with the Post for scoops and ad dollars.
“It’s no secret: People aren’t in love with the Post-Dispatch,” Hoffmann told Business Journal Editor Erik Siemers during a ticketed breakfast at the St. Louis County Library attended by more than 200 people, most of them local business executives.
A key part of his turnaround plan? Appeal directly to local businesses.
“What we plan to do is get the business leaders together in St. Louis with our people in the Post-Dispatch, and say, ‘What do we need to do to make this better,’ not only for the paper, but for the community, because it’s important to all of us,” Hoffmann said. In relation to elected officials and civic leaders working to reignite growth in the St. Louis area, he emphasized: “You’ve got to have a newspaper that’s promoting what you’re doing,” instead of “tearing down” such efforts.
Post journalists, worn down by two decades of cost cutting, newsroom layoffs and shrinking readership under the previous management at Lee, say Hoffmann’s comments make them wary.
“People are being cautious about this Hoffmann stuff,” said one Post reporter who spoke to Gateway Journalism Review on condition of anonymity. “Hoffmann has never talked to us directly about what he might do with the Post. There’s some anxiety about layoffs, but that comes with the territory of journalism.”
“He’s not spoken to anyone at the Post-Dispatch; I don’t even think he’s spoken with our editor,” said David Carson, a staff photographer at the Post who serves as president of the United Media Guild, the union that represents 52 of the paper’s employees in areas including editorial, advertising and production.
“The only way we’re finding out about what Hoffmann’s plans are is when we’re hearing about it from the Business Journals,” Carson added. “We would love to talk to him. I know other unions at Lee would also like to talk with him.”
A spokeswoman for Lee, Tracy Rouch, declined to comment on questions from GJR and said Lee executives were not available for an interview. The Post’s executive editor, Alan Achkar, didn’t respond to a voicemail and e-mail from GJR seeking comment.
Competing definitions of a newspaper’s public-service role
Hoffmann’s emerging vision for the Post, coupled with the reaction in the paper’s downtown St. Louis newsroom, looks likely to fuel a debate that centers on competing definitions of the public-service role of traditional metropolitan dailies. Should newspapers act primarily as advocates for civic and business projects favored by wealthy owners like Hoffmann? Or should they see themselves as skeptical observers, calling out shady dealings and documenting failures when civic and business leaders deliver less than promised? Or is some combination the best approach?
Hoffmann, who sees himself as a protector of traditional newspapers and emphasizes the importance of local coverage areas such as city government and high school sports, appears to be taking a position as a cheerleader for the region. He told his audience on Feb. 5: “I want you to be proud of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And I want it to be a competitive weapon to attract business to St. Louis and to keep businesses here, because our news is so good, and it’s thought of so well. Just like you like to win baseball games, let’s win the publicity game with newspapers in America.”
Carson called comments like those concerning.
“That’s not the role of a newspaper. The role of a newspaper is to hold the powerful to account and to inform the public,” Carson told GJR.
He added that sometimes this will involve clearly positive stories, like the arrival of St. Louis’s Major League Soccer team City SC in 2023 and the accompanying rejuvenation of a large section of downtown. But other times, Carson said, it will involve highly critical stories such as the Post’s coverage of hulking, vacant buildings like the former AT&T tower and the shuttered Macy’s department store that are emblematic of St. Louis’s struggling central business district.
The Post journalist who spoke anonymously said: “With billionaire owners of newspapers, sometimes it’s exciting at first with the money and resources they say they’ll put in, but they don’t understand the newspaper is a public service. Then when things don’t work out, they start making cuts.”
Of Hoffmann, the journalist added: “I don’t believe he’s a benevolent billionaire.”
So far the biggest winner from Hoffmann’s dealings, at least from a news perspective, is the St. Louis Business Journal. During the interview with Siemers he supplied a steady stream of newsy nuggets, volunteering that he’s considering moving Lee’s headquarters to St. Louis from the company’s longtime base in Davenport, Iowa. He also said he’s interested in eventually buying the St. Louis Cardinals. (The team’s current owners told the Business Journal the Cardinals aren’t for sale.)
Hoffmann also volunteered that his company is in talks about buying the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which is scheduled to shut down in May after the newspaper’s owner lost an extended legal battle with its unionized workers. (Another of Hoffmann’s companies is in the process of buying the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team.)
The Business Journal provided GJR with access to the full audio recording of the Feb. 5 event, which was part of the publication’s Advance STL program, an initiative to address major issues facing the region.
The Business Journal omitted mention of one of Hoffmann’s remarks in its own extensive coverage. Citing the weekly’s generally pro-business approach, he told Siemers: “I think the St. Louis Business Journal is much more highly regarded in the community than the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.” (On stage, Siemers countered that the Business Journal receives plenty of its own criticism when the paper publishes an item some readers think is too negative.)
Three papers a week with earlier deadlines
Hoffmann assumed the role of Lee Enterprises chairman in early February, upon completion of a deal in which Hoffmann contributed $35 million of a total $50 million equity investment that resulted in Hoffmann owning 53% of Lee’s shares. Hoffmann had started buying Lee’s stock in 2024.
In a related transaction, Lee’s creditors agreed to reduce the interest rate on the company’s $455 million debt to 5% from 9% for five years, which the company expects will save it $18 million each year. This is crucial for Lee, which posted a net loss of $5.1 million in the most recent fiscal quarter.
Readership numbers at the Post-Dispatch are one indicator of why Lee has struggled so much with its debt in recent years. The Business Journal, citing regulatory filings, reported in January that the Post had 67,357 digital and print subscribers in September 2025, down 23 percent from a year earlier.
The Post-Dispatch was one of several Lee papers that eliminated its Monday print edition last fall. Hoffmann said the Post will always have a print edition, but that it will likely be less frequent.
“My thought is that you start printing on maybe, Friday-Saturday-Sunday, and not during the week, and then you rely on digital for the remainder of your news locally,” he said.
As a public company, Lee remains separate from Hoffmann’s other companies, including Hoffmann Media Group, which owns more than 40 publications across the country. Both Lee and Hoffmann Media own dozens of smaller local and regional newspapers, but Lee’s holdings include major metro dailies such as the Post-Dispatch, the Buffalo News and the Omaha World-Herald. Their scale and complexity could present challenges for Hoffmann.
The broader Hoffmann Family of Companies spans sectors including winemaking, manufacturing, financial & professional services, and hospitality & entertainment. Its brands include DHR Global, an executive search firm, and Oberweis Dairy.
Last year Hoffmann Media bought the Missourian of Washington, Mo., where David Hoffmann was born and raised.
This month Lee plans to shift printing of the Post-Dispatch to the Missourian’s presses from a facility owned by USA Today Co. (formerly Gannett) in Peoria, Ill. The move has already triggered one concrete change at the Post: earlier deadlines for its print editions (see related GJR story for more details).
Criticizing Post-Dispatch coverage of winemaking in Augusta
Hoffmann and his wife Jerri made their first big splash in the St. Louis area in 2021, when they announced plans to invest $100 million in and around the small town of Augusta, about 40 miles west of St. Louis, to make the historic winemaking district into a destination they hoped would eventually rival California’s Napa Valley. They bought several wineries, acquired thousands of acres of land, renovated more than 50 buildings, and eventually secured much wider distribution of the region’s wine.
The main goal was to put Missouri wine on the map, and Hoffmann told the audience on Feb. 5 “we have to a large extent done that.”
But as the Post-Dispatch and other media outlets documented in numerous stories throughout 2023, 2024 and 2025, some of Hoffmann’s plans never got off the ground. Plans for attractions such as helicopter tours and a new golf course ran into obstacles and were scrapped. Development of a luxury hotel remains paused amid tough market conditions, and Hoffmann entities faced several lawsuits over money disputes.
In its coverage of the Hoffmann project the Post-Dispatch quoted a variety of public officials, business owners and residents. Some of those quoted expressed strong support for the Hoffmanns’ efforts, but others worried about the negative effects on the Augusta area, such as promised tax revenue from projects that never materialized.
Hoffmann told Siemers on Feb. 5 that while his projects to revitalize Augusta received a lot of good press, the negative stories, particularly in the Post, hurt the endeavor. He claimed that 85 percent of the coverage was “inaccurate,” and that it took away his companies’ enthusiasm for the project, although they remain committed to completing it.
“What surprised us is when we’d walk in downtown Augusta, people would come up to us and thank us and hug us [saying] oh my God it’s so great what you’re doing,” Hoffmann recalled. “And then we’d read we’re the antichrist in the newspaper. I said, wait a minute. Where’s the disconnect here?”
He continued: “I do plan to fix that with media locally. These businesses – you can’t attack them. I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat, I’m down the middle, and the reason I’m down the middle is because they both buy our ice cream, they both buy our wine.”
Hoffmann added: “It seems to me, the Post is a little too left. I don’t think it needs to be [politically] right, I think it needs to be in the middle, and I think journalism has to be accurate, and I think it has to be credible. Therein lies the opportunity for local news.”
“When he says left-leaning, is he talking about just the editorial page or the rest of the paper?” the Post reporter asked GJR. The reporter added that staffers at the Post aren’t sure what Hoffmann means due to his lack of direct communication with the staff, as well as his tendency to make off-the-cuff remarks about things like buying the Cardinals.
And the reporter pushed back about the Post’s coverage of Hoffmann’s projects being inaccurate.
“We got all our information from public documents, like court records and assessor’s office records,” the reporter said. “Our integrity as a newspaper lies in our accuracy, and we always correct the record if something’s factually inaccurate.”
The reporter also noted that the Post’s reporters and editors have access to metrics that demonstrate how the paper’s big investigative pieces are still drivers of new subscriptions. One example is a series of recent stories that uncovered multiple instances of possible fraud in a program that distributed pandemic relief funds to small businesses and nonprofits on the city’s North Side.
“We know when we write accountability and investigative stories, readers eat that up,” the reporter said.
Jack Grone is editor of McPherson, an independent journalism start-up based in St. Louis. He is a former reporter and editor for Dow Jones Newswires whose writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. Follow him on X at @McPherSTL.
