A filing made with the FCC earlier this month has revealed one of Cumulus Media’s largest post-bankruptcy stakeholders is likely to be a controversial hedge fund manager reviled in the newspaper industry, accused of hollowing out newsrooms across America.
Multiple Transfer of Control Amendments show Alden Global Capital President Heath Freeman will hold a 31.86% voting interest in the reorganized broadcaster through an entity called Next Gen Radio Enterprises LLC, pending regulatory approval.
Alden began as a distressed-debt investor before pivoting into newspaper ownership around 2010, when it acquired MediaNews Group out of bankruptcy. Its footprint has since grown to include the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Boston Herald, the New York Daily News, the Orange County Register and dozens of other daily and weekly titles, largely consolidated under Tribune Publishing, which Alden fully acquired in 2021.
NPR described Alden on the day its Tribune Publishing acquisition closed as a “vulture” fund known for making deep newsroom cuts. NewsGuild reported that Alden offered buyouts across Tribune’s newsrooms within days of taking control, cutting news staff by roughly 20%.
NewsGuild-CWA President Jon Schleuss has said Alden cut nearly three-quarters of its newspapers’ combined workforce between 2012 and the end of 2020. Nieman Lab describes a consistent pattern: acquire a distressed paper, sell off real estate and other saleable assets, cut staff until margins recover, and reinvest precious little back into the newsroom.
That real estate strategy drew its own congressional scrutiny. In a 2019 letter, Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY-D) wrote to Freeman directly, citing reports that Alden had built commercial real estate subsidiaries specifically to spin off newsroom office and printing facilities for sale or lease after acquisition.
A year later, Sens. Dick Durbin (IL-D) and Tammy Duckworth (IL-D) wrote to Freeman, this time over Tribune Publishing specifically, after Alden built a 32% stake in the company — a size almost identical to the interest now disclosed in Cumulus’s filing — that was followed within months by buyouts and the departure of the Chicago Tribune‘s top two editors. “Alden Global Capital must reverse course and put an end to policies that have hollowed out local newspapers and their staff across the country,” the senators wrote.
Newsroom reaction has at times been public and pointed. In 2018, the Denver Post‘s own editorial board ran a front-page rebuke of Freeman, warning that continued cuts represented “the beginning of the end” of the paper. When Alden began a fresh round of cuts at the New York Daily News in February, eliminating 28% of the union’s members, unit chair Michael Sheridan said the move showed the fund “has no interest in investing in local journalism, but instead want[s] only to squeeze the paper and its staff dry.”
Cumulus filed for prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 5, 2026, in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, and the court confirmed its reorganization plan on April 15. The plan doesn’t take effect until the FCC approves the ownership transfer, a process Cumulus told a federal court in June it expected to close by late summer or early fall 2026.
Earlier this week, the broadcaster was granted a 120-day extension of its Chapter 11 exclusivity periods, pushing its exclusive plan-filing window to October 30 and its solicitation window to December 29.
