Few suburban newspapers have existed as long as the Daily Herald, founded as the Cook County Herald just seven years after the end of the Civil War.
But now, the news organization that prides itself as “Suburban Chicago’s Information Source,” is facing a major transition. On Monday, Alden Global Capital, the private equity firm which owns Tribune Publishing and is the second-largest newspaper owner in the United States, officially took ownership after acquiring the state’s third-largest newspaper for a reported $24 million from Paddock Publications.
The next steps will likely follow the same trail that Alden has blazed many times before: significantly cut costs, particularly journalists, and reduce the publication’s ability to provide in-depth local coverage at scale. According to Crain’s Chicago Business, the Tribune sent a memo to Paddock, only committing to retaining staff at their current salaries and benefits through the end of 2026.
This comes after Paddock, which maintained ownership of 19 other newspapers in Central and Southern Illinois, abruptly shut down 13 of them in early June with little notice given to subscribers.
This case isn’t an anomaly. According to the Medill State of Local News Project’s database, nearly a quarter of newspaper closures or mergers since 2024 have occurred in suburban neighborhoods. Rural communities have seen the majority of closures and mergers, but losses in suburban areas account for a greater share of losses than in cities or towns – a little reported byproduct of the nation’s local news crisis.
The classification of city, suburban, town or rural comes from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Shaw Media, which owns 32 titles across suburban Chicago, had an agreement to buy the Daily Herald this past winter before Alden swept in, per Crain’s reporting. But had the initial agreement gone through, Shaw President and CEO John Rung told Medill, it would’ve kept all of Paddock’s Downstate publications operating.
“I know a little bit about other communities in Southern Illinois, and I have the sense that those papers, that local community newspaper, is very important to them,” Rung said. “That would have factored into our thinking.”
While the Downstate papers aren’t categorized as suburban per the NCES classification criteria, their closures are still a symptom of the circumstances facing suburban news companies that often hold titles in more remote areas, which Shaw does as well.
“Probably the biggest loss for the market is the Daily Herald and Shaw working together to make sure things were covered in the suburbs,” Rung said. “It’s unlikely that we’ll have the same arrangement with Alden, … [and] the truth is that that is disappointing.”
A hyperlocal focus
Founded in 1964, Herald Community Newspapers on Long Island, New York isn’t nearly as old as the Daily Herald or Shaw Media. Still, said Zachary Richner, director of Richner Communications which owns the 27 Herald publications, they’re confronting the same headwinds.
From rising costs in industry-specific goods like newsprint, to growing expenses impacting the entire economy like health insurance, it’s challenging for an organization that operates on already-thin margins to continually run a viable business.
But there are solutions already in the works. Most notably, the Empire State Local News Coalition, which Richner founded and leads, spearheaded New York passing the first in the nation tax credit that delivered $90 million over three years to eligible newspapers and broadcasters for hiring reporters.
The coalition is also working toward trying to convince the state to pass the Lift Our Communities, Advertise Locally (LOCAL) Act which would create a tax credit for small businesses to advertise with local news organizations.
Richner knows that policy is only one piece to the puzzle, though.
“I think that suburban newspapers, if you’re focused on hyperlocal content, you’re way better positioned than the metros, dailies and the regional newspapers because we are covering the high school soccer game and who made the honor roll and the church bake sales and things that truly nobody else is covering,” Richner said. “Whereas a lot of these metros, dailies, they do great work, but if they disappeared, you would still have a thousand places to find out that same information.
“There’s no shortage of stories about what Donald Trump or the New York Knicks did,” Richner said.
On Long Island, there are more than 900 taxing districts and 100 different school districts, emphasizing a need for hyperlocal coverage in order to be successful and keep readers informed of the actions of their local officials.
“I do think that the way to stay viable in this economy, in the industry dynamics, is to have scale,” Richner said. “We do see two or three large groups, including us on Long Island. We’re bullish on the state of the industry. That’s certainly not to say there aren’t incredible challenges, but we are looking to continue to grow because we think we need to grow to stay alive.”
The question is, how do you go about delivering the information, said Ken Doctor, founder and CEO of Lookout Local, a nonprofit news organization with sites in Santa Cruz, California and Eugene, Oregon. Doctor authored the book “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get” that came out in 2010.
He refers to the fundamental dilemma facing suburban community newspapers as “The Straddle”: how to balance printing anywhere from once a week to seven days a week and having a robust set of digital offerings.
“It is increasingly difficult to make that work, as we see what’s going on with the [Minnesota] Star Tribune, which has been one of the best-case histories, now looking at doing layoffs,” Doctor said. “Big changes at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. So, two of the biggest that have straddled but have really tried to maintain large newsrooms and community service are struggling.”
In January, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution pivoted, eliminating its print product and moving to a fully digital publication; meanwhile, the Star Tribune laid off 15% of its staff in early June and said it’s exploring shifting to a nonprofit structure.
The existing legacy outlets need to shift their mindsets, especially suburban outlets that have stronger community ties, Doctor added. At Lookout Local, community betterment is the key priority.
“That’s a little different than the traditional model of a daily newspaper,” he said, also noting that if he could afford to buy a legacy suburban newspaper, he’d probably look in a different direction.
“I think that the burdens of legacy newspapers, both the economic structure, the mindset of still doing print is so hard to overcome to create a forward-reaching local news organization that’s going to be built to last,” he said.
In this together
It’s no shock to hear that declining advertising revenue is a large culprit for the struggles of news organizations. Print and digital newspaper advertising has plummeted a reported 60% in the past decade. Rung argues, though, that the way outlets responded to this trend has been misguided.
“One mistake that newsrooms made maybe 10, 15 years ago was they were really looking at cutting the newsroom and not so much advertising with the logical thought that well, advertising is the revenue, and news is expense,” Rung said, “But the truth of the matter is, advertising is going away no matter how many sales reps you have, and really you’re back to the fundamental of the business, which is news, and people wanting, needing or interested in your relevant content.”
Like the Long Island Herald properties, Shaw aims to prioritize reader needs and interests first and foremost.
“We need to keep as much news and relevant content in the paper as humanly possible,” Rung said. “We should go anywhere else in the organization to be efficient before we go to news. … When we embraced the concept that the last place we were going to [make cuts] was news coverage, our business really turned around.”
It sounds simple. Yet, companies like Alden don’t view the situation similarly.
With local advertising becoming a harder revenue source, Shaw looks to create events and opportunities that bring local businesses and readers into the same spaces. They’ve also bought numerous radio stations in an effort to have a greater footprint in these communities as well.
In recent years, there’s also been a rise of nonprofit newsrooms, like The Record North Shore in Chicago’s north suburbs, that aim to build a more durable community resource.
But as with any challenge of this magnitude, there is no one silver bullet.
“We have some real challenges, but I also believe that more and more people are understanding how important local news is, and the reason why Shaw is still around is because we understand that, and we’re not giving up,” Rung said. “I believe that if you just keep fighting and keep trying to do the right thing and serving the communities that you’re in, that eventually it’s going to equalize and will survive. I think that’s realistic more than optimistic. But I’m certainly not pessimistic.”
Receiving that consistent community buy-in, Richner added, will be key to keeping other news organizations out of the hands of firms like Alden, which has seemingly viewed delivering quality community journalism and making a profit as mutually exclusive goals.
“It’s important for people to step up,” Richner said. “I know people get bent out of shape when a hedge fund buys their newspaper, but a lot of times it doesn’t happen overnight, and the owners and publishers ask for support and for investment, people aren’t willing to do it, and then they’re upset when it inevitably sells to a hedge fund or goes out of business.
“Everyone’s in this together, and it’s important that if [a local newspaper] is as important to the community members as they say it is and as we’ve seen it be once these publications go out of business, step up, support it, advertise, subscribe. Because once it disappears, they don’t usually come back.”
