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By Mark Penn - 04/18/16
In recent debates, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump boasted about the millions of votes they have received in the presidential primaries, with each touting the 8 million or 9 million votes they have won so far. So, out of a country of about 321 million people, these candidates will take maybe 10 to 12 million votes each by June — votes from less than 4 percent of the country. Modern communications, higher voter education and the power of the internet are colliding with outdated methods of voting and participation to produce a system badly in need of reform. The result is a democracy that is veering off course, increasingly reflecting the will of powerful activist groups and the political extremes, and not of the broad population of the country. The numbers paint a stark picture of what is happening. When we subtract those under the voting age, convicted felons and undocumented immigrants, there are about 226 million people eligible to vote, according to the U.S. census. So forget one person, one vote — we are about 1.4 people, one vote. But there is nothing unusual here, though everyone should understand that every vote carries a special responsibility of also voting for those with no vote.Of the 226 million eligible voters, about 153 million voters were registered as of the last presidential election — left out of the system are mostly downscale, less-educated whites, and disproportionately more Asian and Hispanic voters. Black voters are 73 percent registered, compared with 73 percent of all women and 69 percent for men overall. So come November, 73 million eligible voters won’t be able to vote because they are not on the registration rolls. More people have cars than are registered to vote. More people have smartphones. More people even have healthcare than are registered to vote. Something virtually everyone should have, the right to vote, is something enjoyed by only 70 percent. About 130 million people vote in the presidential election, so the actual participants in the system for the most important election in the world represent just over 50 percent of those eligible to vote. There are 100 million left behind when it comes to getting up, registering and voting. This huge number of voters just outside the system distorts our elections and how they are fought, helping to foster gridlock and division because no one is trying to get the broad masses to the polls. Instead they are cherry-picking selected groups — religious and ideological — to gain an edge. With the presidential candidates now having $1 billion or more at their disposal, they realize that rather than appealing to pesky swing voters and to voters on the other side of the aisle, they can just double down on elements of their base. Rather than bring the country together, they demonize their opponents to hype turnout among select groups, targeted by race, religion or ethnicity. Fear and division replace hope as the motivating elements behind campaigns, and 90 percent of the advertisements are now negative ads. Most campaigns are no longer about reaching out to swing voters but rely more heavily on ginning up the base. While the candidates might win, the people lose, because government keeps getting more divided. Now let’s look at the presidential primaries. In the two contested party nomination processes we are having, a total of about 40 million people will participate in caucuses and primaries, about 20 million on each side, if contested races go on for long enough. So we now have a system in which it takes just 10 million votes out of 321 million people to seize one of the two coveted nominations — and that’s only if it goes all the way to West Virginia. So exactly how did we get a system in which so few determine the fate of so many? With 186 million people on the sidelines in the primaries, it is no wonder we are faced with more extreme candidates rising to the top on waves of new voters. After all, if all you need is 10 million, we’ve devolved to 30 people, one vote. We need to reform this system top to bottom if we want true representative democracy, as opposed to elections driven by causes on the left or the right. The registration process is broken; it should start at birthright. When kids are born in the hospital, give them a voter card and not just a Social Security card. Leave no child behind when it comes to being registered to vote and having voting ID. Second, we need to dramatically increase general election voting from 130 million to 200 million or more. Election Tuesdays come from the horse and buggy days — we need to move voting to weekends, allow voting from the internet or from secure accessible facilities like ATM machines. I am not a fan of early voting because it tends to mute the effect of the last two weeks of a campaign, which can be pivotal in many elections. I would rather have extended voting all day Saturday and Sunday. Third, caucuses need to be abolished. Often without even the secret ballot and open only to those with time on their hands, this is not a fair process for picking a president in the 21st century. Usually turnout to a caucus is only one-fourth of the turnout to a primary. Fourth, we need to rethink the party primary process to bring in far more voters, and we need to rotate the geographic order so that no one bloc of voters becomes a permanent gateway to the presidency. If we are going to have just two parties, then almost everyone has to be welcome to vote in one of them. The process has become dominated by activists, not everyday voters — it’s no accident America might wind up choosing between Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders, two candidates largely out of step with the true viewpoint of most Americans. It is the product of a system that fails to bring in most voters. And the candidates increasingly realize that with such low turnout, pitches to the left or the right are required to get elected in a country that is made up of more moderate voters than liberals or even conservatives. So while we all look at our TV sets in amazement watching candidates calling for mass deportation or tearing down our economic system, we have to understand we have not updated and modernized our democracy as we have grown, and we have not taken advantage of the technology and innovation that makes it easier today to get a car and drive than it is to vote. Most importantly, the effects of this crazy quilt of voter participation are not just to leave a lot of people out but to promote and even reward the politics of the extremes that have produced the gridlock everyone bemoans. If we reform the voting system, we will once again make elections about persuading a majority of all Americans and not just about driving those select few to the polls. It is time we rolled up our sleeves and started fixing this before one of the candidates skilled at manipulating the system actually becomes president. And if one does, let it be because that person are the real choice of a majority of Americans. Penn is managing partner of The Stagwell Group. He previously served as chief strategy officer at Microsoft and has advised numerous global political leaders, including serving as chief strategist on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and as White House pollster to former President Clinton for six years. He authored the New York Times best-seller “Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes.” Via Theo Horesh
A recently deceased mentor and friend once told me about a Vietnam War protest in front of the Pentagon, where against his more peaceful instincts, he spontaneously picked up a stone and threw it at the behemoth, and as his gaze softened and he looked around, he found to his astonishment that all its windows were shattering, as scores of protesters, in a moment of outrage, sent their own stones sailing. There is a moment like that happening today. Listen closely and you might feel a rumbling that courses through political conversations, and it is not just the familiar trumping of fascist boots-on-the-ground. We have watched the best minds of a generation ground-up by inequality and social-anxiety, watched the decline of democracy and the rise of dynasties, the worst prosper, while the rest fall behind—and Hillary Clinton is beginning to represent, to many young Americans, the most detestable elements of the new elite: the smug sense of entitlement, the fusion of money and politics, the craven clamor for war, the swaying to the winds of a public unhinged from reality. And the windows may be about to explode. Democratic Party elites are alienating a whole new generation of voters and potential party players through their dismissal of Bernie Sanders. Even as he crushes Clinton in a sequence of five-states by 50-percent margins, raises more money, draws in more donors, commands bigger crowds, inspires more devotion, steals the debates, and ruins Republicans in head-to-head polls, still, they insist the primaries are over. It does not matter, because Clinton is the new face of machine politics. Just as she is owned by the big-donors, she owns the party leadership, who serve as her backstop. The sense of entitlement is simply astounding. And the bullsh*t mounted when Clinton’s campaign strategist, a Wall Street consultant of all people, announced on CNN that Clinton would not debate Sanders unless he changed his tone--unless he changed his tone. The same people who tarred the Obama candidacy as a “fairy tale” in 2008, in the words of President Bill, portray Sanders as a racist, old, gun-toting white-man. The constant reference to Sanders’ purported pro-gun record is a barely disguised effort not to talk issues but to paint a caricature for inner-city African Americans. Clinton even hinted that Sanders supports the so-called Minute-Men, who guard the Mexican border. Never mind the fact he once got arrested fighting for civil rights, that the National Rifle Association score his record at a D-minus, or that his program would benefit the disenfranchised more than any President since FDR; the innuendo never lets up. And then Clinton projects onto Sanders the negative tone for which she is so well known. It is a common tactic of bullies. This same patronizing tone can be found among her supporters, who argue for realism as they worry for their assets. They act as if it is all decided and no one else had a chance. They reverse history and argue that having spent eight years living in the White House is not a reason to keep her out but to put her back in. They argue winning is impossible by blurring the difference between delegates and superdelegates, omitting that superdelegates have always shifted allegiance to the most popular candidate. It is a lie as big as the Iraq War Clinton helped start; it is as corrupt as her militant shilling for Israel to win support from the second most powerful lobby. Clinton supporters are running out of arguments. The “yes, we can” of Obama 2008 is morphing to the “no, you can’t” of Clinton 2016: no you can’t criticize our candidate, no you can’t pass big programs, no you can’t win the superdelegates, no you can’t beat Trump. This is cynical and wrong. Sanders has higher favorability ratings than anyone in this race. And he destroys Republican rivals in polls. He is popular because inequality and money-in-politics worry everyone, and they are arguably the most vexing issues in America today. And if he is nominated, he will bring a whole new generation out to vote, and will enter office with the Supreme Court, and possibly the House and Senate, on his side. We can win, actually, and we can win big. Tens of millions of us now feel the burn of economic inequality, of political corruption, of Presidential dynasties, of a patronizing Party, and the media’s half-disguised campaign; most of all, we feel the burn for something better. Bernie can win. And all of this hope and frustration looks poised to erupt over the next couple of weeks, as the media black out, the string of blowout victories, and the arrogant dismissals, collide with what is beginning to look like the largest social movement in a decade. But as you pick up your word-stones, take a moment to look around, inhale a deep breath, remember your ideals, and let this be an election in which love stares down hate and wins: something beautiful is about to blow open and it is time we open it together. Jonathan Webster writes: Dear LoCO, Please Stop Being DicksA couple weeks ago I went on Twitter to tell Lost Coast Outpost, Humboldt County’s very popular online news site, why I think they should post fewer mugshots. They did not agree. Now a Humboldt State University journalism professor has chimed in. She does not agree either. Her column in this week’s North Coast Journal provides ample room for LoCO’s editor to explain his justifications. (I wasn’t contacted by the author.) She also writes about websites that charge money to remove mugshots, a police agency in Utah that tried to copyright them, a legal battle in Michigan, and search engine results in Europe, but she never clearly articulates my argument for why LoCO, in this community, in 2016, should exercise a little restraint. Here’s my attempt to do that: LoCO has a relatively large audience among a small population, and that audience was built on Facebook. Facebook’s sorting algorithms favor links with images and the layout of the site makes them very prominent. When a LoCO post with a mugshot hits Facebook, the mugshot gets blown up, the face is cropped in on, and it is broadcast to a substantial percentage of Humboldt’s eyes. Normally, someone put in jail has to worry about what they’re going to say when they make their phone call and when a potential employer or date Googles their name someday. With LoCO and Facebook’s help, they now have to worry about the added humiliation of being recognized on the street. Without them ever being convicted of a crime, a picture that makes them look as guilty as possible pops up on 53,000 Facebook feeds simultaneously. They now have to worry about just going outside. The Journal’s columnist casually dismisses this fear by explaining that in her experience “people are terrible with faces.” Regardless of the actual risk, the psychological difference between having your name posted on the web somewhere and having your face (in addition to your name) blasted out to tens of thousands of people on social media is enormous. In short, LoCO has a lot of power. I think they should try to use that power responsibly. Lost Coast Outpost would like to abdicate that responsibility by becoming an information resource system that would contain “total coverage of the criminal justice system” and allow users to “track every crime and arrest through its resolution.” Unfortunately for LoCO, the police in Humboldt County do not cooperate with this idea. They selectively decide which crimes are worthy of press releases and which ones to give the media mugshots for, and that leaves LoCO in the awkward position of possibly having to do journalism. In the absence of a system that allows the media to become a window through which we can directly observe every detail of police activity, LoCO has a choice: they can either unquestioningly post every mugshot that the police have deemed suitable for our viewing (their current, admitted practice), or they can filter that information the same way they filter every other source of information they use. Every time the media chooses to report on a story and not another one, they are acting as a Jonathan Websteryesterday8 min readDear LoCO, Please Stop Being DicksA couple weeks ago I went on Twitter to tell Lost Coast Outpost, Humboldt County’s very popular online news site, why I think they should post fewer mugshots. They did not agree. Now a Humboldt State University journalism professor has chimed in. She does not agree either. Her column in this week’s North Coast Journal provides ample room for LoCO’s editor to explain his justifications. (I wasn’t contacted by the author.) She also writes about websites that charge money to remove mugshots, a police agency in Utah that tried to copyright them, a legal battle in Michigan, and search engine results in Europe, but she never clearly articulates my argument for why LoCO, in this community, in 2016, should exercise a little restraint. Here’s my attempt to do that: LoCO has a relatively large audience among a small population, and that audience was built on Facebook. Facebook’s sorting algorithms favor links with images and the layout of the site makes them very prominent. When a LoCO post with a mugshot hits Facebook, the mugshot gets blown up, the face is cropped in on, and it is broadcast to a substantial percentage of Humboldt’s eyes. Normally, someone put in jail has to worry about what they’re going to say when they make their phone call and when a potential employer or date Googles their name someday. With LoCO and Facebook’s help, they now have to worry about the added humiliation of being recognized on the street. Without them ever being convicted of a crime, a picture that makes them look as guilty as possible pops up on 53,000 Facebook feeds simultaneously. They now have to worry about just going outside. The Journal’s columnist casually dismisses this fear by explaining that in her experience “people are terrible with faces.” Regardless of the actual risk, the psychological difference between having your name posted on the web somewhere and having your face (in addition to your name) blasted out to tens of thousands of people on social media is enormous. In short, LoCO has a lot of power. I think they should try to use that power responsibly. Lost Coast Outpost would like to abdicate that responsibility by becoming an information resource system that would contain “total coverage of the criminal justice system” and allow users to “track every crime and arrest through its resolution.” Unfortunately for LoCO, the police in Humboldt County do not cooperate with this idea. They selectively decide which crimes are worthy of press releases and which ones to give the media mugshots for, and that leaves LoCO in the awkward position of possibly having to do journalism. In the absence of a system that allows the media to become a window through which we can directly observe every detail of police activity, LoCO has a choice: they can either unquestioningly post every mugshot that the police have deemed suitable for our viewing (their current, admitted practice), or they can filter that information the same way they filter every other source of information they use. Every time the media chooses to report on a story and not another one, they are acting as a gatekeeper of information. It is inherent to the job. To pretend that news organizations are suddenly not supposed to be gatekeepers where arrests are concerned is absurd. LoCO’s editor insists, “instead of complaining about selective reporting on the part of the media…people should push for complete and consistent release of information.” First of all, that is a false choice. Second, I am advocating for more selective reporting, not less. Third, if you admit that you don’t have access to complete and consistent release of information, why would you try to operate a news site as if you do? Even in parts of the country that do allow the media unfettered access to any mugshot they want to publish, many sites that consider it a public service to post all of them still have policies in place to reduce the chances of an innocent person being permanently tarnished. The Journal Star in Lincoln, NE, keeps the daily batch of photos it gets from the sheriff’s office online for only one day and does not store the images (unless one runs with a story.) The columnist in Humboldt’s Journal relates that LoCO’s policy is to never take down any of their mugshots except in extremely rare circumstances, even if the subject has been exonerated. She suggests that LoCO does this to avoid being confused with sites that extort people by posting their mugshots and charging a fee to have them removed. It is unclear why LoCO is required to adopt such an extreme position when they can simply state they don’t remove mugshots for money. (Perhaps it’s because they fear admitting that it’s possible to profit off of mugshots would draw attention to the fact that they’re essentially doing that too, only in a different form.) A publisher who runs several sites across the country that do remove mugshots after posting them is quoted providing exactly that disclaimer in a piece for Columbia Journalism Review: “Rickabaugh said his company does not charge to remove mugshots.” It’s that easy. The Tampa Bay Times also has no fear of this confusion, choosing to remove all mugshots after 60 days, “about the time it takes for a case to be adjudicated…especially when criminal charges could change, a person is found innocent, or a case is dismissed.” Matt Waite, a professor of journalism at University of Nebraska-Lincoln who helped build the Tampa Bay Times’s mugshot website, believes removing photos of people who are never convicted of a crime is essential to ensuring those sites are providing a positive public service: “If your Web application does not reflect the current reality, then you are wrong. You are publishing knowably false things, and by doing so you are harming people.” Of course, a lot of debate about when to take mugshots down is rendered unnecessary if mugshots of people who could easily be innocent are not published in the first place. But in the minds of LoCO’s editor and the Journal’s columnist, the media choosing to not post every mugshot they have the opportunity to post is tantamount to the government eliminating transparency altogether. The columnist writes: I feel uncomfortable about the posting of mugshots. But the first stage in the creation of a police state involves secret arrests, detentions and disappearances. What’s worse? That you get arrested for something you didn’t do and the whole world sees it and you have to explain it later to a potential employer? Or you get arrested and detained for something you didn’t do and nobody ever knows?Ignore the glaring false dilemma (her piece is full of them), and focus on the conceit behind it, that mugshots are a feature of government accountability. She appears to believe that photos taken by the police against people’s will, used by the police to identify and track them, and only selectively distributed to the press, are our first line of defense in fighting a hypothetical modern gestapo. The police, who control every stage of mugshots’ production and dissemination to the media, are somehow kept in check by those mugshots. This argument makes absolutely no sense. If the police wanted to arrest someone in secret, they just wouldn’t take the photo. Mugshots are a tool created by and for the police, not citizens. They exist not only to help identify people and catch criminals, but as PR tools, making arrestees look as much like criminals as possible and inspiring confidence that cops are doing their job well. When the media submits to being a mouthpiece for that PR, they are doing the police’s job for them, and neglecting their own. The first stage in the creation of a police state is not “secret arrests, detentions and disappearances.” There are certainly earlier stages, and it isn’t hard to imagine one of them involving the media refusing to question if broadcasting every single word and image the police want broadcast to the public is actually a good idea. Our media is supposed to be an ally in resisting a police state, not a collaborator with it. The assumed equivalency of mugshots and government accountability comes up again later in the column when she writes, “Some people argue that sites like LoCO publish mugshots for entertainment value. I’m not sure that I would devalue transparency just because some people find certain types of info entertaining.” Again, mugshots have nothing to do with transparency, but the more important issue she brings up here, one that gets right to the heart of LoCO’s carelessness and cruelty, is how they function as advertisements for recreational ridicule. There is no doubt that mugshots are good for generating internet traffic and stimulating rowdy comments sections. Megan Abbot writes in the New York Times, “the news media have realized the power of the mug shot to draw interest, to attract clicks.” The Journal’s columnist admits this power exists but puts the blame for it squarely on readers. In her eyes, it’s not LoCO’s fault that lots of people love to gossip about and make fun of human beings at extremely low points in their lives, it’s ours. But LoCO has shown over and over that they are perfectly willing to encourage this activity. Take for example a post from March 1st that popped up in my Facebook feed. At the top is a brief quote from a press release. In the middle is the obligatory huge and unflattering mugshot, serving as billboard advertisement for the post. Below that is a headline that jokingly refers to the subject’s “wardrobe malfunction”. Below that is a caption for the mugshot, reading “First, pull up your pants…”. This is not a case of shameless hooligans mocking someone because that’s the nature of the internet and there will always be those kinds of people, this is a case of LoCO actively inviting people to join in on the mockery they’ve already started. There is no mention of any alleged crime unless you click the link. It is the responsibility of every media organization to not add further misery to the lives of people put behind bars, many of whom are already battling poverty and addiction, if the best reason for doing so is attracting pageviews. If running a mugshot will help catch a criminal or prevent a crime, run it. If the subject is a well-known public figure or the alleged crime is egregious, by all means, run it. If the subject has been convicted of a crime that you believe is newsworthy, run it. If the subject has not been convicted of a crime, has not been accused of anything violent, and running it will negatively affect their lives and possibly even hinder recovery, consider allowing a tiny sliver of human compassion into your editorial process and maybe don’t run the mugshot with the story. Run some other kind of image. That’s all I’m asking. There is no good journalistic argument to not practice that restraint. Many publications already avoid mugshots. Even ones in Humboldt. This is not a crazy concept I just made up. Basic decency is expected of all local news outlets in certain parts of the country. Humboldt should expect it of Lost Coast Outpost. . It is inherent to the job. To pretend that news organizations are suddenly not supposed to be gatekeepers where arrests are concerned is absurd. LoCO’s editor insists, “instead of complaining about selective reporting on the part of the media…people should push for complete and consistent release of information.” First of all, that is a false choice. Second, I am advocating for more selective reporting, not less. Third, if you admit that you don’t have access to complete and consistent release of information, why would you try to operate a news site as if you do? Even in parts of the country that do allow the media unfettered access to any mugshot they want to publish, many sites that consider it a public service to post all of them still have policies in place to reduce the chances of an innocent person being permanently tarnished. The Journal Star in Lincoln, NE, keeps the daily batch of photos it gets from the sheriff’s office online for only one day and does not store the images (unless one runs with a story.) The columnist in Humboldt’s Journal relates that LoCO’s policy is to never take down any of their mugshots except in extremely rare circumstances, even if the subject has been exonerated. She suggests that LoCO does this to avoid being confused with sites that extort people by posting their mugshots and charging a fee to have them removed. It is unclear why LoCO is required to adopt such an extreme position when they can simply state they don’t remove mugshots for money. (Perhaps it’s because they fear admitting that it’s possible to profit off of mugshots would draw attention to the fact that they’re essentially doing that too, only in a different form.) A publisher who runs several sites across the country that do remove mugshots after posting them is quoted providing exactly that disclaimer in a piece for Columbia Journalism Review: “Rickabaugh said his company does not charge to remove mugshots.” It’s that easy. The Tampa Bay Times also has no fear of this confusion, choosing to remove all mugshots after 60 days, “about the time it takes for a case to be adjudicated…especially when criminal charges could change, a person is found innocent, or a case is dismissed.” Matt Waite, a professor of journalism at University of Nebraska-Lincoln who helped build the Tampa Bay Times’s mugshot website, believes removing photos of people who are never convicted of a crime is essential to ensuring those sites are providing a positive public service: “If your Web application does not reflect the current reality, then you are wrong. You are publishing knowably false things, and by doing so you are harming people.” Of course, a lot of debate about when to take mugshots down is rendered unnecessary if mugshots of people who could easily be innocent are not published in the first place. But in the minds of LoCO’s editor and the Journal’s columnist, the media choosing to not post every mugshot they have the opportunity to post is tantamount to the government eliminating transparency altogether. The columnist writes: I feel uncomfortable about the posting of mugshots. But the first stage in the creation of a police state involves secret arrests, detentions and disappearances. What’s worse? That you get arrested for something you didn’t do and the whole world sees it and you have to explain it later to a potential employer? Or you get arrested and detained for something you didn’t do and nobody ever knows?Ignore the glaring false dilemma (her piece is full of them), and focus on the conceit behind it, that mugshots are a feature of government accountability. She appears to believe that photos taken by the police against people’s will, used by the police to identify and track them, and only selectively distributed to the press, are our first line of defense in fighting a hypothetical modern gestapo. The police, who control every stage of mugshots’ production and dissemination to the media, are somehow kept in check by those mugshots. This argument makes absolutely no sense. If the police wanted to arrest someone in secret, they just wouldn’t take the photo. Mugshots are a tool created by and for the police, not citizens. They exist not only to help identify people and catch criminals, but as PR tools, making arrestees look as much like criminals as possible and inspiring confidence that cops are doing their job well. When the media submits to being a mouthpiece for that PR, they are doing the police’s job for them, and neglecting their own. The first stage in the creation of a police state is not “secret arrests, detentions and disappearances.” There are certainly earlier stages, and it isn’t hard to imagine one of them involving the media refusing to question if broadcasting every single word and image the police want broadcast to the public is actually a good idea. Our media is supposed to be an ally in resisting a police state, not a collaborator with it. The assumed equivalency of mugshots and government accountability comes up again later in the column when she writes, “Some people argue that sites like LoCO publish mugshots for entertainment value. I’m not sure that I would devalue transparency just because some people find certain types of info entertaining.” Again, mugshots have nothing to do with transparency, but the more important issue she brings up here, one that gets right to the heart of LoCO’s carelessness and cruelty, is how they function as advertisements for recreational ridicule. There is no doubt that mugshots are good for generating internet traffic and stimulating rowdy comments sections. Megan Abbot writes in the New York Times, “the news media have realized the power of the mug shot to draw interest, to attract clicks.” The Journal’s columnist admits this power exists but puts the blame for it squarely on readers. In her eyes, it’s not LoCO’s fault that lots of people love to gossip about and make fun of human beings at extremely low points in their lives, it’s ours. But LoCO has shown over and over that they are perfectly willing to encourage this activity. Take for example a post from March 1st that popped up in my Facebook feed. At the top is a brief quote from a press release. In the middle is the obligatory huge and unflattering mugshot, serving as billboard advertisement for the post. Below that is a headline that jokingly refers to the subject’s “wardrobe malfunction”. Below that is a caption for the mugshot, reading “First, pull up your pants…”. This is not a case of shameless hooligans mocking someone because that’s the nature of the internet and there will always be those kinds of people, this is a case of LoCO actively inviting people to join in on the mockery they’ve already started. There is no mention of any alleged crime unless you click the link. It is the responsibility of every media organization to not add further misery to the lives of people put behind bars, many of whom are already battling poverty and addiction, if the best reason for doing so is attracting pageviews. If running a mugshot will help catch a criminal or prevent a crime, run it. If the subject is a well-known public figure or the alleged crime is egregious, by all means, run it. If the subject has been convicted of a crime that you believe is newsworthy, run it. If the subject has not been convicted of a crime, has not been accused of anything violent, and running it will negatively affect their lives and possibly even hinder recovery, consider allowing a tiny sliver of human compassion into your editorial process and maybe don’t run the mugshot with the story. Run some other kind of image. That’s all I’m asking. There is no good journalistic argument to not practice that restraint. Many publications already avoid mugshots. Even ones in Humboldt. This is not a crazy concept I just made up. Basic decency is expected of all local news outlets in certain parts of the country. Humboldt should expect it of Lost Coast Outpost. THE HIDDEN FACE OF CONSOLIDATION- A "VULTURE FUND" SPECIALIZING IN "event-driven opportunities," & "undervalued companies," Alden Global Capital LLC managed $2,243,686,000 in assets from 16 clients. Check out what this means for the BAY AREA NEWS GROUP.
Alden Global Capital 101 January 28, 2016 Digital First Media Workers Or, why is a secretive club of millionaires buying up America’s newspapers? First in an ongoing series on Alden Global Capital and Digital First Media It’s not easy to find information about Alden Global Capital, the firm that owns most of Digital First Media. Even Alden’s company website oozes an aura of secrecy. The site is accessible only to Alden’s private investors, the homepage displaying a client log-in form, a New York phone number, an email address — and nothing else, though there’s a lovely background photo of an evergreen forest. Because Alden is privately held, it rarely has to report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and details are scarce. No investors are named, no specifics are offered as to what they’re investing in. But there are more layers to the shroud. Alden’s activities are especially hard to track because many of its funds have offshore headquarters and have changed or added names — and locations — multiple times since their parent company was founded in 2007. There’s the now-defunct Alden Global Capital Limited, and the currently operating Alden Global Capital LLC. There’s Alden Global Opportunities Fund (Cayman) LP, and Alden Global Hellenic Opportunities Fund LP. The list goes on. In all, 24 Alden-related entities currently have filings with the SEC. Though it’s often described by Bloomberg and others as New York-based, it’s clear from the filings that many of Alden’s offshoots are (or were) headquartered in places with reputations as international tax havens — specifically the Cayman Islands and the English Channel island of Jersey Last week, however, Alden briefly surfaced in the public arena when it reported for the first time on its investments in Greece. Invest in distress Though Alden is known for investing in distressed newspaper companies, it also invests in distressed countries. In 2014, the company launched its Alden Global Hellenic Opportunities Fund to take advantage of the economic collapse in Greece, and last week the Hellenic fund reported to the SEC that it had raised $12.9 million from 17 investors. This business of investing in nations or companies when they’re down and out is known in the financial world as a “vulture fund.” In its 2015 brochure for prospective investors, Alden’s stated strategies are to invest in “event-driven opportunities,” undervalued companies, and “investing in opportunities in Greece and benefiting from the recovery of the Greek economy.” When describing its financially distressed assets, the brochure says, “These obligations are likely to be particularly risky investments, although they also may offer the potential for correspondingly high returns.” As to Alden’s net worth, filings show that as of March 2015, the primary company Alden Global Capital LLC managed $2,243,686,000 in assets from 16 clients. That’s more than $2.2 billion for anyone not interested in counting those commas and zeroes. The minimum investment to get in on this action? That’s $100,000 to $2 million, Alden’s brochure states. There are also special arrangements for those who think such amounts are chump change: “Separately managed account relationships are subject to significantly higher investment minimums that are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.” Buying the news So how did this billionaires’ vulture fund come to own many of America’s newspapers? Soon after its inception, Alden began investing in distressed newspaper companies, including Gannett, McClatchy, Freedom, Tribune, PostMedia, Philadelphia Media, and Media General, according to Harvard’s Nieman Lab. When the Journal Register company emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, Alden bought shares. In 2011, it bought the company outright. Meanwhile, MediaNews’ parent company was coming out of bankruptcy in 2010. Alden acquired a large stake and several of its executives sat on the MediaNews board. Then, in September 2013, news releases announced that Journal Register and MediaNews were uniting to form Digital First Media, or DFM. There was no mention of the real mover behind this historic “merger without merging,” as the Nieman Lab’s Josh Benton calls it. That mover was, of course, Alden Global Capital. DFM became the second-largest newspaper company in the U.S. in terms of circulation. Once the promises of a bright digital future for newspapers died down, many of those papers’ considerable real estate and other assets were sold off. As layoffs and severe cost-cutting escalated (though, as media analyst Ken Doctor has noted, profits remained high), Alden began negotiating to sell all of DFM to the highest bidder in 2014. In 2015, another private investment firm, Apollo Global Management, was announced as the buyer. The deal abruptly went bust as buyer and seller apparently couldn’t agree on a price. Today, Alden still owns DFM with no clear plan in sight. To say Alden has invested in news media may be a misleading term. To many of us, investing implies an injection of capital, perhaps with the connotation of nurturing a fledgling business into profitability. In contrast, the Alden-DFM method has been described as a “chop shop” strategy of dismantling newspapers’ physical operations, stripping off assets and profits, then hoping to sell whatever’s left. Meanwhile, every day Americans are still waking up and expecting to read the news, whether it’s printed on paper or on their local newspaper’s website. Whether they read it on smart phone or a tablet, people still expect to find out what’s happening in their communities and what elected officials, nonprofit groups and businesses are up to. That fact appears to be unimportant to Alden and its investors — indeed, the word “news” appears nowhere in Alden’s investment brochure. There’s more to this story, much more, which we’ll be investigating and bringing to you in future posts. Coming next in this series, Hedge Funds and Newspapers — A Simple Primer. |
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February 2018
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