“Sometimes I think about the list of things that the newspaper covered,” Mr. Rauck said. “Not necessarily in a story, but that it checked off — sharing local sports news, seeing little Janie’s name in the paper, pictures of local things.”
He added, “We didn’t have Nextdoor or Facebook.”
Even before Alden became its owner, The Blade-News endured significant cutbacks.
The austerity measures — which included moving its journalists to the office of The Capital Gazette, its sibling publication in Annapolis — were put into place as more readers chose to get their news online. That shift meant the industry could no longer rely on its traditional source of cash, print advertising.
Over the last 15 years, more than one quarter of newspapers, mostly weeklies like The Blade-News, have gone out of business, according to a University of North Carolina study. Alden and other hedge funds have bought struggling papers, seeing them as undervalued assets that can be made profitable after further cutbacks.
Donovan Conaway, the primary reporter at The Blade-News and the writer of the article on the Bowie police officer accused of theft, said in an interview that he would continue to report on Bowie whenever there was “a major crime, a big event.” His work will appear on the Capital Gazette site.
Three years ago, another Blade-News reporter, John McNamara, who worked out of The Capital Gazette’s office, was one of the five people killed in the shooting there. On July 15, Jarrod W. Ramos, a disgruntled reader who had pleaded guilty, was found to have been sane and therefore criminally responsible for the attack.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/business/media/alden-tribune-newspapers.html
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