The news came almost in tandem, a worthy encapsulation of the media’s plight under capitalism. First, after great effort, the journalists of the New York Daily News achieved an important milestone: they formed a union for the first time since the 1990s.

The celebration, though, was short-lived. The new union soon learned it would have to contend with Alden Global Capital, the predatory hedge fund that acquired the rest of Tribune Publishing, the owner of the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and other local newspapers. The $630 million deal, announced on February 17, came after Alden became the company’s largest shareholder in 2019.

As recently detailed by Branko Marcetic in Jacobin, there are few fates worse for a modern newspaper than becoming a property of Alden Global Capital. The rapacious hedge fund maximizes whatever profit its newspapers can produce by enacting deep and lasting cuts to staff. “They’re shameless about cutting. They don’t care about the social value of the news, at least not in any meaningful way,” Gregory Pratt, the Chicago Tribune City Hall reporter, told NPR. “They will say that they do. They will argue to the contrary, but their actions where they gut newspapers across the country say otherwise.”