The Lights Are On, but Nobody’s Home
Walk into the Hartford Courant newsroom and you’ll hear more echoes than phone rings. Staff cuts since 2008 top 60 percent—standard for papers bought, stripped, and flipped by private-investment funds [1].
What Counts as a Ghost Paper?
Researchers call a title a “ghost” when it still prints but has lost most of its reporters. Margaret Sullivan notes that U.S. newspapers shed nearly half their newsroom jobs between 2008 and 2018 [2]. Penelope Abernathy’s UNC team maps hundreds of counties now served only by such phantoms [3].
How We Got Here: Debt, Roll-Ups, and the 45-Percent Guillotine
Hedge funds chased double-digit margins in classifieds, borrowed cheap, bought chains, layered fees, and harvested real estate. Alden Global Capital cleared a 17 percent operating margin while closing bureaus and selling buildings [4]. The 2019 GateHouse-Gannett merger created a 250-daily megachain run from McLean, Virginia—not from local pressrooms [5]. Former New York Times editor Dean Baquet warned that most local papers would “die within five years” without new ownership models [6].
Civic Consequences: No One Left to Read the Zoning Agenda
Less reporting means higher borrowing costs and lower turnout. A Journal of Politics study found municipal bond yields rise after newsroom cuts [7]. Ken Doctor tracked similar spreads in counties that lost watchdog reporters [8]. The result: taxpayers pay more, officials face fewer questions, and polarized social feeds fill the vacuum.
Why Mercury Local Bets on Depth, Not Strip-Mining
We hire locally, publish weekly, and license content under Creative Commons to widen reach. The model trades page-view quotas for engagement with readers who catch a planning-board loophole faster than any AI summary. Debt service: zero. Accountability reporters: growing.
Endnotes
- Susca, Margot. Hedged: How Private Equity Dismantled American Journalism (2024).
- Sullivan, Margaret. Ghosting the News (2020), p. 18.
- Abernathy, Penelope. The Expanding News Desert (UNC Hussman, 2022 update).
- NewsGuild-CWA, “Alden Capital’s Hidden Profits,” April 2023.
- Securities and Exchange Commission filings, New Media Investment Group, 2019.
- Dean Baquet interview, Columbia Journalism Review, Oct. 7 2020.
- Gao, Lee & Murphy, “Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance,” Journal of Politics 82(2), 2020.
- Doctor, Ken. Newsonomics column, March 15 2021.
About the Author
Fueled by a mug of dark roast that’s probably one refill too many, Peter Cellino lurks on Bluesky as @pc51.bsky.social—slide into the DMs. Browse the Blog, crunch the Case Studies, raid the Resources hub (start with the Local SEO Playbook), or see ad slots that respect readers at Advertising, including Charlotte Mercury and Strolling Ballantyne.
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This article, “Ghost Papers: How Hedge Funds Hollowed Out Local Newsrooms,” by Peter Cellino is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0.
“Ghost Papers: How Hedge Funds Hollowed Out Local Newsrooms”
by Peter Cellino, Mercury Local (CC BY-ND 4.0)