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On a late-September evening in the small coastal town of Homer, Alaska, a reporter named Chloe Pleznac prepared to cover a memorial honoring Charlie Kirk. She was nervous, sensing that many of Kirk’s supporters might prefer that she, as a member of the press, not be there at all. Pleznac—who is twenty-five, circumspect and earnest, with sea-colored eyes—had grown up in Homer. After working at a radio station in Juneau, she was thrilled to land a position at the Homer News. It paid less than working the fry station at McDonald’s, but she considered getting the job a stroke of luck. She chronicled fishery openings, cat rescues, planning commission meetings, high school sports—civic mortar. “These are my people. This is my community,” she said. “There are so few platforms here to tell these stories.” 

She also understood, with the clarity that comes from wading through the steady drip of small-town rumor, that some corners of Homer saw the paper as having a liberal bias. When Sarah Vance, a Republican state representative, posted plans for the Kirk vigil on Facebook, Pleznac thought the event could provide a chance to hear from conservatives. On a rocky beach, where a few hundred people gathered, she fought a creeping sense of self-consciousness. Cassie Lawver, the founder of a local conservative political action committee, began by warning what to do if there was a shooting at the event. “Stay where you’re at, and if it gets hectic, just kind of hit the ground,” she said. Pleznac, who had been more worried about a verbal confrontation than gun violence, was alarmed.

She took the next several days to write. She worried that some of her neighbors might scrutinize how the piece represented Kirk and his supporters, but she took reassurance from a few people who approached to say something to the effect of “I saw you at the vigil—I’m so glad you were there,” she recalled. In the article, she described Kirk as “a far-right political activist and Christian-Nationalist icon” and matter-of-factly quoted from the eulogies, including the announcement of one of the country’s first Turning Point schools, in Homer. 

Twenty-four hours after the piece was published, Pleznac’s phone lit up. A friend she hadn’t heard from in years texted out of the blue: “You need to look at this.” It was a link to a Facebook post from Vance, who had denounced Pleznac’s article on Alaska state letterhead as part of a missive sent to Carpenter Media Group, the publisher of the Homer News. Vance accused the article of “hate-baiting at its worst” and wrote that if the paper continued such “partisan rhetoric,” the consequences would be “financial as well as reputational.” Outrage toward the newspaper detonated. That evening, just before Pleznac had to moderate a city council forum, she watched comments from across the country pour in. Though she had recently quit smoking, before the event, she lit up with shaking fingers.

Carpenter Media reacted swiftly. Without consulting Pleznac or her editor, who was the regional editor for the Homer News and two other Alaskan papers, Carpenter removed the article from the website. Then the company stripped the terms to which Vance had objected and republished the piece without a note to indicate the story had been altered. The article has since been removed from the website altogether. “The original story did not meet the basic journalistic standards of any objective reporter or editor,” Tim Prince—Carpenter Media’s president and chief executive, responsible for day-to-day operations—told me later, in a written response to questions. (He did not specify what standards were violated.) “The subject of the story, or the political party of the many readers who complained about it, had no bearing on how the story was handled,” he added. “Stories are almost never removed from a website we are responsible for, but failing to do so when the local community alerts us to a problem would be reckless at best and certainly not in keeping with the high standards we set for ourselves.” When I asked about Carpenter Media’s communications with Vance, Prince declined to share details, except to say, “I do not know Rep. Vance, nor was she the first local reader to voice concern about the accuracy and objectivity of the initial story published on our website.” (I sent a state records request for Vance’s communications with Carpenter Media, which was denied. Alaska’s legislative affairs agency replied that state law “does not provide an appeal process for denial of legislator records.”)

Carpenter Media Group, based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, has grown into a media empire at a rapid clip. When the company bought the Homer News, in March of 2024, it operated just twenty-seven publications in a handful of states. Today, it runs more than two hundred and fifty outlets in the United States and Canada and is America’s fourth-largest newspaper company. “Many newspaper operations have been offered for sale in recent years due to structural challenges, ownership transitions, or financial distress,” Prince told me. “We have been willing to step in where others were not, particularly when the alternative was closure.” He said that the company has been willing “to do difficult turnaround work,” taking over papers “that require change, investment, and disciplined management—not passive ownership.”

In practice, that means Carpenter Media has often taken dramatic action. Acquisitions have come with widespread layoffs—and that, in turn, has drawn repeated rebukes from the NewsGuild–Communications Workers of America, the national journalists’ union, which argues the company puts profits ahead of journalism. As a private firm not required to reveal financial details, Carpenter Media’s funding and business decisions can be difficult to track. “Where’s this money come from? Is it coming from politicians? We don’t know,” Courtney Scott, the executive officer of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, a local chapter of the NewsGuild, said. “I’m very concerned about freedom of the press with them at the helm of these companies.” As the Federal Communications Commission pushes to deregulate ownership rules designed to limit consolidation in television networks, Carpenter Media is contributing to a parallel corporate takeover of America’s local newspapers, leaving journalists like Pleznac vulnerable.

As the vitriol piled up, Pleznac began to fear for her safety. As her landlord joined the chorus of commenters, using the laughing emoji and liking Vance’s post, Pleznac retreated to her parents’ house. She worried about being recognized while venturing out for groceries. At one point, she looked back at a piece the Homer News published when she arrived, introducing her to the paper’s readers as a reporter born and raised in town. She barely recognized the person she was then. “Wow, this is so hopeful and, like, slightly naive,” she said, recalling her reaction. Carpenter Media’s decision to undermine her work, and the resulting hostility she faced, had taken a toll. “I’m definitely more cynical now,” she said.

This was not the first time Carpenter Media had waded into its publications’ coverage. In the spring of 2024, when Carpenter bought the Everett Herald, a scrappy, award-winning Washington State paper, Caleb Hutton, the local news editor, had never heard of the company. In those days, Carpenter was primarily operating small publications in the South, which Hutton said looked less like functioning newsrooms and more like content mills. “Some of it was just, like, literally copy-and-pasting city council agendas,” he said. “There wasn’t a whole lot of depth there.”

Several months later, Hutton and about half of the Herald’s staff abruptly lost their jobs as Carpenter Media made sweeping cuts at newly acquired papers across the Northwest. “I didn’t hear a peep until they laid me off,” Hutton said. “They were evaluating people who didn’t know they were being evaluated. Just looking at a quick snapshot of ‘How much traffic is this person driving on the website?’” (“It is not accurate to characterize performance evaluation as a secret or a sudden event,” Prince told me. “Expectations regarding productivity, quality, and engagement were repeatedly communicated.”)

The Herald wrote about the job losses, quoting a union representative who stressed that “Carpenter Media cannot enact layoffs without first bargaining with the unionized workers.” Then the story disappeared. Hutton, who had agreed to stay on temporarily to help his colleagues handle the transition, was horrified. He and the managing editor warned their boss that everyone at the paper was prepared to walk out by the end of the day if the article wasn’t restored. “Our mission is to shine a spotlight on things,” Hutton told him. “We’re holding ourselves to that same standard.”

They ended up on a Zoom call that afternoon with Todd H. Carpenter, the company’s chairman. “I remember a difficult conversation during a period of significant change,” Prince told me. “The discussion was direct, respectful, and focused on operational realities.” Hutton described the meeting as “hostage negotiations.” The article was eventually replaced with a friendlier version, which removed the term “gutted,” corrected the location of Carpenter Media’s headquarters (recently relocated from Mississippi), and added a statement attributed to Carpenter. “We must have a strong business with highly productive people to meet our standards,” it read. (“The article revisions were made to correct factual inaccuracies and ensure the reporting met our editorial standards,” Prince told me.)

Hutton wasn’t naive. Like many who have been inside a newsroom, he knew the business had been circling the drain for years. But Carpenter Media’s approach took him by surprise. In a statement on the company’s website, Todd Carpenter had criticized the trend of private-equity takeovers by investors, warning that newspapers can’t survive under owners whose top priority is financial. Prioritizing “earnings per share and return on equity,” he wrote, wrecks “newspapers, plain and simple.” 

Carpenter’s own career began in local journalism, in the mailroom of the Tuscaloosa News. He had followed in his father’s footsteps: In 1959, Jerry Carpenter had been hired by Buford Boone, the publisher of the News, and, as a high school senior, he learned how to cast molten metal into lines of type. At the time, Boone was known for his straight-shooting, unbiased reporting, winning a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing that expressed support for desegregation. When Jerry first went to apply for work at the paper, he had walked past a group of Klansmen protesting its coverage. “My mom and dad taught me right from wrong, and Buford Boone taught me how to apply that in my work,” he said later. That ethos, of a newspaper family rooted in principled civic courage, became Boone’s legacy. As his granddaughter Catherine Hadaway, a director at Boone Newsmedia Inc., told me in an email, her father used to say, “Our goal is to be generous with those who build our company and make our reputation.”

Jerry Carpenter spent the rest of his life working with the Boones, as did his son Todd—until recently. Todd worked his way through college at the University of Alabama in the Tuscaloosa News circulation office, then became the general manager at another of the publisher’s papers. He rose through the ranks to serve as CEO of Boone Newsmedia for nearly a decade. “Todd grew up in a newspaper family, just as I did, that viewed local journalism as both a public trust and a business,” Prince told me. “That background instilled a belief that newspapers matter, that communities deserve reliable information, and that ownership carries responsibility beyond quarterly results.” When he wasn’t running newspapers, Todd bred and trained horses, another family pastime. (He did not respond to interview requests for this piece.)

In 2023, Todd Carpenter broke off to form his own company. “Many sellers then and now were seeking a buyer who would keep their newspapers operating, not dismantle them,” as Prince put it. “CMG was created to meet that need.” Carpenter walked away from Boone with ten publications across the South. The terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, but Hadaway told me in an email, “We felt we had gotten too big to tend to all the details.” She spoke highly of Todd Carpenter, saying that she wished him “much success.” 

Carpenter’s message to employees was that he aimed to preserve local journalism by acquiring titles from shuttered or struggling chains. But a pattern quickly emerged, Scott, the union officer, observed. The company pledged to invest in communities, only to slash the staff meant to cover them. “This is just Carpenter’s business model,” she said. “They buy. They cut half the staff.” Scott told me that, at a recent bargaining session with another media company, an executive reassured employees by saying, “Don’t worry, we won’t be like Carpenter.”

In Everett, Carpenter Media demanded that the remaining reporters crank out two to three stories a day, a quota the company’s lawyer said in an email would soon apply across all Carpenter outlets. Prince argued that the changes were necessary and that they improved newsrooms’ focus. “Legacy revenue models no longer exist to support legacy cost structures,” he told me. “The core values remain the same, but the tools, pace of change, and economic realities are very different.” The result was immediate and obvious: a drop in quality so stark that readers complained. At another Carpenter Media acquisition, the Mercer Island Reporter, a subscriber wrote in, “Patterns of factually inaccurate and biased reporting have been repeatedly raised with the editor, to no avail. It’s misleading our citizens about what is happening in our schools and on our school board.” 

The Everett Herald, for its part, lost decades of institutional knowledge. Stories now go uncovered. Hutton had dug into cold cases, sitting down with families to ask the questions no one else would. “It’s a document of community history,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many times people told us how much it mattered to them that somebody was listening and cared.” He is now an assistant metro editor at the Seattle Times. “There’s a lot of lip service from Carpenter where it’s like, ‘We believe in the value of journalism’ and all that—but there also seems to be this disconnect,” he said. “You want to invest in these communities, and then you, time and time again, paper by paper, lay off people.”

That contradiction came into similar focus thousands of miles away, in Hawai‘i. In March of 2024, Carpenter Media took over the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, where Cindy Ellen Russell had spent twenty-three years as a staff photographer. Russell was one of the first journalists the paper sent, in August of 2023, to Lahaina when it burned; she talked her way onto an early aid convoy. At a gym that served as an evacuation site, she met a man whose shoes had melted off his feet as he fled the flames. In a disaster defined by destruction on a staggering scale, her portrait distilled the horror, helping draw global attention to the urgent needs of survivors. 

The fires, and the rampant speculation that followed about their impact and available aid, underscored the importance of local news. The Star-Advertiser provided an essential antidote to misinformation. “When people don’t have answers, when they don’t have facts, they start speculating,” Russell said—and they fill the void with an “insatiable hunger for information.” Months later, according to Kevin Knodell, the paper’s union steward, when Carpenter Media took over, the paper eliminated the last two unionized photographers, leaving two photo editors with no one on staff to manage. Russell lost her job. An attorney representing Carpenter during bargaining told reporters to use their phones to snap photos on assignment. (Prince said he wasn’t aware of that policy, and “equipment standards are set locally and vary by newsroom.”)

Like the Everett Herald, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser was one of a hundred and fifty imprints in the United States and Canada that had been owned by a company called Black Press Media— until its president retired, and the firm collapsed into bankruptcy, in January of 2024. At auction, Carpenter Media won the bid over Alden Global Capital, the New York investment group infamous for slash-and-burn newsroom takeovers. Scott and other union observers were puzzled. “We were like, ‘How? With what money?’” she recalled. A reporter from a paper formerly owned by Black Press quipped that Alden might have been the kinder option.

Black Press entered creditor protection in Vancouver on January 15, 2024, and filed for bankruptcy in Delaware the same day. The filings offer a rare window into Carpenter Media’s books. In them, Black Press describes “a sizable loss of readership” as print subscriptions cratered, along with a sharp decline in advertising revenue, leaving it 195 million Canadian dollars in debt. Many of its prior liabilities, such as its pension obligations, were excluded from the sale.

That March, Carpenter Media secured a 25 percent share of Black Press Media. Research by the NewsGuild suggests that, in order to do so, Carpenter borrowed money from Concordia Bank & Trust, taking out several loans in the weeks before the deal closed. But most of the funding came from two Canadian companies that had previously loaned Black Press money: Canso Investment Counsel and Deans Knight Capital Management, which retained majority control. Canso manages tens of billions from large-scale investors and, as its website notes, tends “to exploit illiquidity.” Deans caters to high-net sworth individuals. Neither is required to reveal its client list, so it’s unclear exactly who is behind the capital, or if any investors could pose conflicts that might affect a news outlet’s coverage. When I asked Prince how Carpenter finances its acquisitions, he replied, “Carpenter Media is privately funded through a combination of owner equity, conventional debt, and seller financing. We do not rely on private-equity structures or short-term exit strategies.”

During a court-supervised restructuring of the Black Press debts, the buyers submitted a plan in which the two lenders would receive a 10 percent annual return on their investment. Though that became a contractual obligation for the newly acquired papers, Prince insisted the agreement didn’t factor into Carpenter’s daily work. “Simply put, we do not manage newsrooms to investor yield targets,” he said.

For investors such as Canso, which manages distressed-debt portfolios, the deal covered familiar territory. Thanks to Black Press’s creditor protection filings, the partnership was able to negotiate a favorable deal—serving as a stalking-horse bidder, for instance, set a minimum price for Black Press Media’s assets, and provided influence over the sale process and the ability to shape key terms, such as how debt would be converted and who would hold equity. The news industry may be struggling, but newspapers often still own valuable real estate, including long-standing downtown offices and other assets like printing presses and distribution infrastructure that can be sold or leveraged. And cost-cutting measures, such as staff layoffs, can ensure that targeted returns are met. In short, the investment firms treated Black Press like an asset-backed hedge, not a journalistic enterprise. 

Through this deal, Carpenter seemed to have found a formula: the firm started buying up family-owned papers from aging owners. In the summer of 2024, Carpenter snagged Pamplin Media, Portland’s biggest newspaper group, from Robert Pamplin, who was eighty-two. At the time, Pamplin said, “Due to age and health reasons, it made sense to pass the company on to someone else who will carry on the tradition of balanced journalism, the old-fashioned way.” As Prince put it, “What happens if these newspapers are not acquired? In many cases, the alternative is closure. Our work exists within that reality.”

Consolidation at this level poses an alarming problem for local journalism. Lately, small family-run papers across the United States have been vanishing through closures or mergers at a pace of about two a week. Often, according to Zach Metzger, the director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern’s Medill School, these publications are in more rural, less affluent communities, increasing “the journalistic divide within the country between ‘news haves’ and ‘news have-nots.’” The result has been less local reporting, and more articles republished from wire services, or syndication within publishing houses. “Everything that you’re seeing politically is filtered through the lens of national political discourse—which I don’t need to tell you is incredibly partisanized,” Metzger said. That, in turn, “influences the way in which local political issues are viewed.” 

Knodell, who reports on military affairs and diplomacy in Hawai’i and the greater Pacific, argues that when regional reporting disappears—and local outlets aren’t around to cover major stories that impact their communities—narratives harden around priorities defined by coastal power centers. “There’s no way to report on what local lawmakers are doing. But we also can miss what the federal government is doing,” he said. In Hawai’i, “the evisceration of regional media has really damaged our news environment, because there’s no shortage of important news,” he told me. “I’d love to be able to keep serving this community, because I think it matters, but it’s getting harder every day to do it with organizations that—with corporate owners—don’t seem to value these communities in the same way that we do.” (He added later, “We are willing to work with them to the degree that they’re willing to work with us.”) The loss is cumulative: Fewer local reporters means fewer national stories grounded in lived expertise, and a public discourse increasingly detached from the full geography of American power and responsibility. It also leaves the journalists who once filled those pages with nowhere to go.

Back in Alaska, in her childhood bedroom, Chloe Pleznac wrestled with the fallout from the Kirk story. “If I keep reporting, then they don’t win,” she recalled thinking. She’d already been surviving on tuna cans, she joked to friends. “If I get evicted,” she said, “I won’t have to worry about paying rent.” Then her editor called to say she intended to resign. 

Alaska’s trouble with Carpenter had been compounding, as the publisher had taken over the Homer News, the Peninsula Clarion—the only other newspaper in an area the size of West Virginia—and the Juneau Empire, the capital’s oldest paper, as part of the Black Press deal. Tensions over cost-cutting and editorial direction soon followed. In June, the Empire’s editor resigned. Pleznac’s editor had taken over management of the paper remotely. 

The week after the Kirk piece was published, Pleznac, her editor, a reporter for The Clarion, and a Clarion editor who had been on staff for twenty-eight years resigned together. They wrote a joint letter addressed to Carpenter Media, alleging that the publisher’s actions had destroyed “the credibility the public has placed in us as reporters and editors” and “the company’s integrity as a purveyor of news.” The same day, Pleznac returned her company laptop—which left her without a computer, and no way to pay her bills. “I felt I needed to do it to walk out of there with any integrity left,” she said. 

It was not an easy choice, but for Pleznac, it felt like the right one. Suzanne Roig—until recently a reporter at The Bulletin, a paper Carpenter Media bought in Bend, Oregon—had a harder time navigating her situation. After forty years in the business, Roig was making twenty-five dollars an hour at The Bulletin, below the living wage in an area that is rapidly gentrifying. In October of 2024, Carpenter Media arrived and pushed for layoffs almost immediately. The staff of The Bulletin, home to a newly recognized union, intervened, pointing out that under federal labor law, a publisher can only terminate jobs while bargaining a first contract with the union as an economic necessity. After a year of job insecurity, in early January, Roig took a voluntary layoff.

Unlike the paper’s former owner, EO Media, which had willingly opened its books when staff had to be cut, Carpenter refused to share its financial documents. “Because they won’t do that, presumably they’re not broke. This is just part of their business model,” Scott said. (“Like most privately held companies, we do not make our financials public,” Prince told me. “That policy is consistent across all of our operations and is not specific to any one newsroom or negotiation.”) Roig recalled that, during a meeting, Carpenter Media’s lawyers said that the decision to downsize was a “philosophical” choice. At the bargaining table, another clash soon emerged: management repeatedly tried to tie raises to three-story-a-day quotas. Negotiations are ongoing. 

Elsewhere, Carpenter Media employees say that vacation and retirement benefits have been cut and that their health insurance premiums have skyrocketed. Todd Carpenter, meanwhile, seems to be thriving. In Tuscaloosa, he is building an elite horse-breeding operation on a nearly hundred-acre farm. One of his stallions, a red-roan show horse called Third Edge, recently set a record for the highest-priced embryo ever sold at a public auction, fetching four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Its stud fee costs more than seven weeks of Pleznac’s former salary. (“Personal assets unrelated to CMG have no bearing on newsroom operations,” Prince told me.)

In Homer, the opportunities for local journalism have become scarce. There is no TV station. Regional public radio has suffered federal budget cuts. This winter, residents concerned about Carpenter’s role in the community pooled resources to start the Homer Independent Press, a nonprofit paper with a volunteer editorial board. “We believe in the independence of the press,” its mission statement reads. For now, there are no full-time reporters, but the debut issue came out in January, covering street-width ordinances, a winter storm, and protesters who gathered on the anniversary of the insurrection of January 6, 2021. 

It’s early days for the Independent Press, and ex-Carpenter employees still struggle to find other media jobs. “I felt so supported to be able to have colleagues that were willing to take a stand,” Pleznac said. She also heard from some readers who inquired about canceling their Homer News subscriptions in solidarity. “I told them it’s a decision you have to make,” she said. “I made my decision.” Though she’d hoped to find another reporting position, needing to pay her bills forced her to come to terms with the “impossibility of me being able to follow this dream of mine.” Recently, she started a job as the communications director for the bipartisan Alaska House Majority Coalition. Her new office, in Juneau, is directly across the hall from Sarah Vance. 

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit.

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