With Deal For McClatchy, Kansas City Star Will See Its Fifth Owner In Four Decades

[TexasTowelie]

Chatham Asset Management already has investments in a stable of newspapers, including a major stake in the parent company of The National Enquirer supermarket tabloid.


The McClatchy Company, the nation’s second largest newspaper chain and the owner of The Kansas City Star, Wichita Eagle, Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer and more than two dozen other daily newspapers, announced on Sunday that Chatham Asset Management had submitted the winning bid for the company at a bankruptcy auction.

McClatchy, burdened by debt it incurred in 2006 when it bought newspaper chain Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion and by pension obligations to 24,000 employees and retirees, sought Chapter 11 protection in February in the Southern District of New York.

Who is Chatham Asset Management?

Chatham is a $4.4 billion hedge fund based in New Jersey. It is McClatchy’s biggest creditor and shareholder. The company, which was founded in 2002, is secretive; its managing partner, Anthony Melchiorre, a one-time head of Morgan Stanley’s junk bond trading division, almost never grants interviews.

In a profile of Chatham last year, Fortune magazine said that during his stint at Morgan Stanley, Melchiorre “could be foul-mouthed and loud, and would berate fellow traders as he bopped around the trading floor in his stocking feet.”

Read more: https://www.kcur.org/news/2020-07-13/with-deal-for-mcclatchy-kansas-city-star-will-see-its-fifth-owner-in-four-decades

[kimbutgar]

1. The guy is a huge GOP donor closely linked to MF45!

I worked with guys like him when I was working for a hedge fund trader. Some of them were major jerks and it appears this guy fits the bill.

RIP McClatchy you will become another right wing disinformation newspaper disaster.

The silver lining, people who still read newspapers are educated and you’re going to lose your Investment in the long run when people stop subscribing to your newspaper. But sadly State pension funds are going to be screwed.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90228218/ohio-n-j-pension-funds-invested-625m-in-hedge-fund-that-controls-national-enquirer-parent

During the last five years, taxpayers in New Jersey, Ohio and California have owned large financial stakes in the owner of the media company that allegedly helped the Trump campaign bury negative stories, according to documents reviewed by Capital & Main and MapLight.

Under Republican governors, the two states committed at least $625 million of pension cash into Chatham Asset Management, a high-risk hedge fund that has taken control of the National Enquirer‘s parent company, American Media Inc., which is at the center of the federal investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. California’s pension fund also has a $235 million stake in a Chatham fund.