How Hedge Funds Destroyed Local News: Pottstown Hosts Special Film Screening

POTTSTOWN, PA — A documentary film detailing the insidious role of money and hedge funds in undermining journalism around the country will be screened as part of a special event in Pottstown next week.

"Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink," investigates the workings of Alden Global Capital, owner of news conglomerates Digital First Media and MediaNews Group, which includes papers ranging from the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News to the Pottstown Mercury.

Director and Academy Award-nominated documentarian Rick Goldsmith, who has made films on the press covering the Pentagon Papers and George Seldes, said he was stunned when he discovered what hedge funds had done to local news.

“First was the notion that profits were to be made by ‘wrecking’ journalism, rather than practicing it," Goldsmith said. "Why? Second was the revelation that money could be made from an industry seemingly in collapse. How? Third — and this is what hooked me — was that newspapermen and women in Colorado were in apparent open revolt against their own publisher. Now that’s news!"

A free screening of the film will be shown The Hill School's Center for the Arts on Tuesday, April 8 at 6 p.m. It will be followed by a panel discussion with Goldsmith, Mercury reporter Evan Brandt, former Mercury sports editor Austin Hertzog, and executive director of the News Guild of Greater Philadelphia Bill Ross.

Filmmakers pointed to Montgomery County's own Mercury as emblematic of the harm done by Alden Global around the country. Like all 76 daily papers and 300 weekly newspapers owned by Alden, the Mercury saw its budget slashed and staff reduced to a tiny fraction of its former workforce and its paper filled with AP wire stories.

Locally, Alden also owns the Daily Local News in West Chester, The Reporter in Lansdale, The Reading Eagle, The Times Herald in Norristown, The Morning Call in Allentown, and The Delaware County Times.

The documentary itself acknowledges that the traditional print model was suffering greatly, and was inevitably going to change, with the rise of the Internet and social media.

"But adapting to that new landscape has become all the more difficult, it not impossible, with Alden bleeding once profitable, debt-free publications," filmmakers added.

Watch the trailer for "Stripped for Parts" here.

The Hill School is located at 766 Beech Street.