“The model is simple,” declared The Atlantic in its cover story for the November 2021 issue. “Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring out as much cash as possible.” The author of the piece, Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins, was writing about Alden Global Capital LLC, the widely-feared buyout…
In its voracious drive to apparently consume as many U.S. newspapers as possible, the so-called vulture capitalist Alden Global Capital recently bought the San Diego Union Tribune and a group of associated newsrooms in southern California. Reports on the purchase focused on the inevitable results of Alden Global acquiring newsrooms: immediate decimation of the staff,…
Last week Elon Musk floated the idea of charging users to use X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. He made the suggestion – which may or may not materialize – during a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Musk said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” to…
Baffled travelers stepping off buses into an unknown city and life. Families huddled on police stations’ floors. Painful accounts of robberies and rapes, and of deaths in jungles and rivers – the price of escaping grim horrors. These and other stories told by the thousands of immigrants who have surged into Chicago in recent months,…
When the Adriana, an overcrowded migrant boat, sank in Greek waters in June, drowning hundreds, the catastrophe was unusual in scale, but those traveling on global migration routes regularly encounter terrible hardship. Most of the coverage of this story, however, was limited to the disaster itself, neglecting to illuminate how a complex, multi-faceted, and deeply…