By Mike Blinder
Alden Global Capital is poised to hold a major voting stake in reorganized Cumulus Media. To many broadcasters, that may sound like another post-bankruptcy ownership story. To those of us in the newspaper business, it sounds like an alarm.
Alden is the hedge fund that built a newspaper empire by buying distressed publishers, cutting staffs, consolidating operations and monetizing real estate and other assets. Now it is coming to radio.
I began my media career in radio. I started as a DJ, worked in sales and management and ultimately became a station manager at a station now owned by Cumulus. I loved radio because it was immediate, local and personal. A great local station could make a community laugh in the morning, help a business grow in the afternoon and become indispensable when bad weather, breaking news or tragedy hit.
Years later, I entered the newspaper business just as digital disruption was turning the industry upside down.
Today, as publisher of E&P Magazine (Editor and Publisher), the 140-year-old voice of the news publishing industry, I work every day with the people fighting to preserve and reinvent local news. I also watched from inside as hedge funds began treating newspapers not as local institutions, but as distressed assets.
The pattern became familiar. Sell the building. Reduce the newsroom. Consolidate copy desks. Cut production. Eliminate local beats. Ask the smaller staff to produce more with less. Then do it again.
The result was not simply fewer jobs, although that was painful enough. Communities lost reporters who knew their school boards, city halls, courts, neighborhoods and local businesses. They lost the institutional memory that allows a newsroom to recognize when something does not add up. They lost watchdogs.
That is why Alden’s arrival at Cumulus should be watched closely by everyone in radio.
But there is one big difference: Radio may not have as much left to cut.
Newspapers, especially metropolitan dailies, once had expensive downtown buildings, printing plants, warehouses, large newsrooms and delivery operations. They had physical assets that could be sold, leased back or abandoned. They had staffing structures built for a much more prosperous era.
Radio has spent decades doing much of its own cutting and consolidating.
Multiple stations now operate out of a single facility. Programming is centralized. Voice tracking and automation have replaced many live shifts. News staffs have shrunk. Promotions, production, traffic, digital support and sales resources are shared across clusters. In too many markets, the local personality and local newsroom that once made radio distinctive have already been reduced to a fraction of what they were.
Cumulus itself has already monetized substantial real-estate assets. In 2020, the company sold roughly 250 tower locations across 32 states in a transaction valued at about $208 million, including sale-leaseback arrangements. It has also sold land and buildings in individual markets.
So what is left?
That is the question broadcasters should be asking. If the biggest tower portfolio has already been monetized and the staffing model is already lean, where does a new financial owner find additional return?
The answer may be local talent. It may be news. It may be promotions, sales support, market management or the very community presence that helps distinguish a local station from a playlist, a podcast or a national stream.
Those things are easy to dismiss on a spreadsheet. They are much harder to rebuild once they are gone.
Radio still has enormous strengths. It remains one of the few media platforms that can be truly local and truly live. A strong morning team is not just content. It is a relationship. A local news voice is not just an expense. It is a source of trust. A creative account executive is not just a salesperson. That person can help a local business understand how to reach real people in its own community.
The stations that win are not simply the ones that run the fewest employees. They are the ones that matter to their markets.
That is why this moment is more than a Cumulus story. It is a reminder of what is at stake throughout radio. Broadcasters have been asked for years to do more with less, to centralize, automate and consolidate. At some point, however, a company can become so efficient that it removes the very local value that made the business worth owning.
I am not predicting that Alden will repeat its newspaper playbook point for point. Radio is a different business. Cumulus has already been through bankruptcy and years of asset sales, debt reduction and operational change. Its new ownership structure may be about stabilizing the company, not dismantling it.
But newspaper people have learned that concern is not cynicism. It is experience.
When a hedge fund acquires influence over a local media company, employees and communities should ask the hard questions early: What is the long-term plan? What local investments are protected? What will be measured beyond short-term cash flow? And who, exactly, is responsible for preserving the journalism, talent and community connection that make the operation valuable?
Radio people are resilient. They have survived deregulation, consolidation, satellite, streaming, podcasts and every prediction that radio was finished. But resilience should not mean accepting an endless decline in local service.
So, radio, welcome to the club. We sincerely hope your experience is different. But we know what to watch for.
Mike Blinder is the publisher of Editor & Publisher (E&P) Magazine and host of the weekly E&P Reports vodcast. A longtime newspaper executive, digital media pioneer and sales strategist, he has spent more than three decades helping local news organizations navigate industry change while advocating for a strong, independent press. The views expressed here are his own.
This piece ran originally in Editor & Publisher and is reprinted here with permission.
