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In 2019, Megan Greenwell was the editor in chief of Deadspin, a thriving sports blog, when its parent company, Gizmodo Media, was acquired by a private equity firm. Things quickly went south, and three months later, Greenwell quit, followed by the rest of the Deadspin staff. She narrated her workplace’s needless implosion in a viral blog post, where she posed the question, “Why did they buy a bunch of publications they seem to hate?” (Last week, the company’s CEO, Jim Spanfeller, laid to rest what remained of the Gizmodo empire, selling off one of its last remaining brands, Kotaku, and publishing an “epilogue” in which he celebrated that the company “will exit having increased shareholder value.”)

The experience inspired Greenwell to investigate what private equity’s growing footprint has done to industries across the country, from retail to healthcare. Her new book, Bad Company, is filled with troubling stats: Eight percent of the American workforce is employed at companies owned by private equity; 20 percent of those companies enter bankruptcy within ten years of being acquired. Meanwhile, the firm makes a profit. The chapters on the media are equally bleak: Between 2004 and 2019, a period when Alden Global Capital bought up dozens of newspapers and GateHouse merged with Gannett to form the largest newspaper owner in the country, half of all newspaper jobs were lost and a quarter of all papers folded. Twenty percent of the surviving papers are ghost papers. But the book doesn’t merely chronicle destruction; it also follows the creative ways that workers are resisting the intrusion of predatory finance into their careers and livelihoods. 

I’d been hearing about the specter of private equity since I worked my first media jobs, in the mid-2010s, but I never really understood how it all worked until I read Greenwell’s book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

CB: How would you describe the effect of private equity ownership on the news industry over the past ten to fifteen years?

MG: Private equity did not cause the fundamental problems in the news industry. They came in and capitalized on existing problems to benefit themselves, at the particular expense of local publications. What became clear to me over the course of my reporting is that the reasons private equity came into media had nothing to do with wanting to strengthen the business models, despite promising they were going to try to solve those problems. There was no attempt at innovation, at creative solutions. They came in because there was still some juice to be wrung from the orange. They lined their pockets and then just discarded these media companies.

You’re saying that layoffs were already happening, but because the quickest way for private equity to maintain profit margins at newspapers was to cut staff, they accelerated mass layoffs—and then drove local newspapers that otherwise wouldn’t have closed into bankruptcy?

Both of those things are exactly correct. A huge percentage of jobs that have been lost in local media over the past decade is attributable to private equity. The number of ghost newspapers—newspapers that do not have a single journalist on staff, that are only running syndicated content—skyrockets every year.

I don’t think private equity firms care about journalism in the slightest. Publications are a widget, just like a hospital or a retail chain, etc. What motivates them is the chance to make money, which remains, for the moment, totally doable from downsizing newsrooms, selling off their real estate and the like. 

Why would company owners sell to private equity firms in the first place?

In a lot of cases, companies don’t have much of a choice in the matter, because the legal standard of fiduciary responsibility will require you to sell to the highest bidder, and that’s true even if it’s not the best financial decision in the long run. But a lot of media owners were also looking to get out, because even if their papers were still profitable, they saw profits going down, and they were looking for an exit. 

This is a flaw in how many generations of leaders in the media industry thought of their revenue responsibilities. For decades, local newspapers were making 20 and 30 percent profit margins, and still a certain type of person who ends up at the head of these organizations thought that was not enough. I think that’s such a problem, because yes, there’s been a downward trend for all sorts of reasons—Craigslist was unavoidable—but few publications would be satisfied with growing just a little bit each year without going under.

With local newspapers, you saw this again and again. It was a family-owned company, the family did not want it anymore, and then private equity is talking a big game about how they’re going to restore the paper to its former glory. A lot of places got swindled into thinking that this really was a good opportunity. The Denver Post is a great example of this. When it was sold to Alden, all the quotes from senior leadership were about how this was going to be the best opportunity for the paper long-term. 

We know how that turned out: eight years later, the paper was in open revolt against its owners. You follow others trying to fight back, including a local news reporter named Natalia who is part of a union committee at the Indianapolis Star while they are trying to reach a contract with Gannett. But the process is so demoralizing that at her next workplace she declines to be on their bargaining committee. I remember the huge push in 2020 to unionize—many newsrooms did so with fantastic outcomes—but you also note that today just 16 percent of American media companies are unionized. 

The fundamental limitation of unions in media, as in many industries, is that unions really only work when the company plays ball. The company is legally required to play ball, but there have to be enforcement mechanisms. Long before the second Trump administration, enforcement has been pretty weak. In the case of Natalia, it took three and a half years to get to a contract with Gannett. That’s just unconscionable. It’s not because the union wasn’t strong enough. It was a result of Gannett taking a hard-line anti-union stance, and there not being any structure in place to call them out on it. That said, both of her newsrooms did eventually reach a contract, and I do think the workers there are much, much better off than they were before. 

I am very bullish on the importance of unions in newsrooms. When I was the editor in chief of Deadspin, I was actually part of the union, and when things were going to hell the union made my life measurably better. It didn’t stop me from getting pushed out of my job, but it absolutely improved my conditions in all sorts of other ways.

Another successful alternative is nonprofit local news. The American Journalism Project has funded dozens of newsrooms in just a few years—a great success. At the same time, you point out that true news deserts aren’t being served by their model, and that they tend to focus less on investigations and more on service journalism. How can a nonprofit model work for local investigations?

There are people doing it. The Mississippi Today blew apart the governor’s office and won a Pulitzer for it. The Baltimore Banner ran very rigorous coverage of the bridge collapse last fall. So it’s not that deep investigations are not there, but it is absolutely true that when you ask readers, they are less excited about that stuff than they are about service stuff.

I read through focus group reports before the American Journalism Project launched Mirror Indy in Indianapolis, and people were saying that when there is a power outage across the city they need to know where the cooling centers are. They don’t know how to get basic information. My hope is that once communities have a healthier media ecosystem, more of them will then get the investigative stuff. You start with the basics, and then you grow out. 

The problem of news deserts in rural areas is a huge nut that nobody has figured out how to crack. There are so many communities without the philanthropic infrastructure to support AJP’s typical model. You probably have to establish the funding model at a bigger organization in the city, and then expand it outward.

You talk about how anomalous it is that American media is a public good that does not, in most cases, receive public funding. What would it take to get more government support for media?

Individual states have done it or are thinking about it. The bill that New York passed in 2024 [providing tax credits to supplement the salaries of local news reporters] was imperfect, but it showed some interesting possibilities. California’s bill [requiring tech companies to pay for linking to news stories on social media platforms] was pushing for something much better, and instead they struck a wildly imperfect deal with Google. Look, is it great? Is it ideal? No, but it is a step. I do think that the only way out of this local news crisis is to put together a whole ton of little steps. I don’t see another option beyond that.

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