Editor's Note
Good night, and good luck End of local newspaper ownership a sad headline for the North Bay
By Jason Walsh
I was hired by Darius Anderson as editor of the Press Democrat’s “Sonoma edition,” the Index-Tribune , in 2014—excited to join a locally owned media company, having experienced news reporting at both locally owned publications, as well as corporate-serving ones. I’d just come from the hyper-local Pacific Sun alt weekly in San Rafael, where drop-in visits from local politicos and avid readers were routine in equal measure. Prior, I had been a reporter at the Marin Independent Journal , a former Gannett gem that had been bought out by MediaNews Group— and quickly subjected to its business model of cost-cutting through staff depletion, cheap buyout offers and a rotating schedule of “unpaid Fridays off” for certain employees. I was
my managing editor regarding hundreds of reports of fires raging throughout the county. Another time I got a call that a barrel had been dumped in front of city hall—with a dead body stuffed inside. Then there was the regrettable call that a longtime member of the city council had been arrested for sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl. From the significant to the silly, we covered everything. Our purses weren’t handsomely rewarded by any means, but the community
seemed to appreciate our efforts. Once the city manager marveled about the outsized influence the paper had on the town. Done well and with sufficient support from ownership, local journalism can matter. When Anderson in May sold the PD , the I-T and the rest of Sonoma Media Investments to Alden Global Capital and MediaNews Group, it marked a tectonic shift in the North Bay media landscape. Not only does it spell the end of local ownership of the North Bay’s daily newspapers—the Marin IJ is under MNG; the Napa Valley Register owned by Hoffman Media Group—but Alden’s bleak track record with community newspapers is well-documented, highlighted by asset fire-sales, wage freezes, staff reductions and turnover. In our main story this issue, “Reading Between the Lines,” longtime North Bay news and business reporter Bill Meagher takes a long, hard look at the shocking sale of the Press Democrat , why Darius Anderson ignored a more lucrative local offer for SMI, and what the PD’s future prospects look like under the stewardship of Alden Global. And here’s a clue: Since the sale, a reported 52 SMI employees have been shown the door. As I write this, the PD’s staff-designed website has been changed to conform to the boilerplate look of the Marin IJ and, presumably, all other MediaNews sites. And if you don’t like it, you’re out of luck: They’ve also struck down the ability for readers to make comments. Say this about Alden Global, they work fast. g
lucky to have been gone by the time New York hedge fund Alden Global Capital purchased MediaNews and the IJ in 2010. Anderson, a lobbyist and developer, was also managing partner of the PD’s parent company Sonoma Media Investments, formed following his purchase of the I-T in 2012, when he and a handful of local investors went all-in on local print media, buying the Press Democrat and its assortment of weeklies. The sunny storyline was that they were committed to saving local journalism, one community newspaper at a time. I’d never met Anderson before, but we’d both attended Novato High School and, though he has a number of years on me, we knew a lot of the same people from back in the day. My tenure with the PD’s Sonoma paper, the I-T, was from 2014 to 2022. Like any community newspaper worth its salt, our coverage ranged from major regional stories (we were the first to spotlight the suspicious dealings of now-disgraced real-estate mogul Ken Mattson) to those of purely colloquial interest (a beloved roadside fir dubbed Arnold the Tree was chopped down in the dead of night, stirring locals into a frenzy). A lot of it was typical small- town fodder—restaurant openings/closings, wedding announcements, centenarian birthday photos, elementary school happenings. NIMBYs opposed everything; the city council was constantly backstabbing. It was often fun; always hard work, and most days carried their share of surprises. And plenty of times the news was quite serious. One autumn morning in 2017, I woke to a 6 a.m. text from
September 2025
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