Buyer of Alaska's largest newspaper has ties to Carlyle Group
Source: PandoDaily
The announcement that the Alaska Dispatch has purchased the Anchorage Daily News has been met primarily with celebrations about the out-of-nowhere triumph of the underdog. “Salmon swallows whale” blared the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s headline. New York University’s Jay Rosen declared this a “crossing point” in which an “online news start-up grows successful enough to buy the local newspaper.”
... The money for the deal came from Alice Rogoff, a journalist and the wife of Carlyle Group’s billionaire founder and co-CEO, David Rubinstein. Rogoff first bought a majority stake in the Dispatch in 2009 and then used her resources to engineer the merger, meaning she now singularly controls what will likely be Alaska’s dominant journalism outlet. As the Dispatch notes, she has “has solely run Alaska Dispatch and will continue to do so” after the merger.
If in the midst of all the underdog triumphalism you missed that part of the story, don’t blame yourself. The Alaska Dispatch’s financial connection to the Carlyle Group – one of the world’s largest financial conglomerates – was only fleetingly mentioned in most coverage. And that particular conglomerate’s deep financial stake in Alaska was almost entirely absent.
Carlyle has a huge financial stake in Alaska economics and policy, and thus in shaping the news Alaska voters receive. For example, just a few months ago, the state-owned Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation inked a deal to let Carlyle manage up to $750 million of taxpayer cash, half of which will go to the firm’s private equity fund. Alaska’s move to put so much money in such high-fee “alternative investments” comes a time when fee-less index funds are often generating better returns for investors. It also comes just as the SEC is investigating such fees. Yet the Carlyle deal means the Alaska public’s money will be, in part, generating fees for Carlyle executives. That means Carlyle potentially has a huge financial interest in making sure there’s as little journalism scrutiny as possible of said fees.
Read more: http://pando.com/2014/04/09/journalists-celebrate-purchase-of-staid-local-newspaper-by-plucky-rival-overlook-plucky-rivals-deep-financial-ties-to-carlyle-group/
