The Morning Call Guild optimistic about new bidder

The Morning Call Guild optimistic about new bidder

By Ben Stemrich

April 6, 2021

Fans of The Morning Call have reason to be optimistic. On April 4, a second bid was submitted to buy the paper’s parent company. 

Billionaires Stewart Bainum Jr. and Hansjörg Wyss came together to put in a bid of $680 million to buy Tribune Publishing, the parent company of The Morning Call. 

Newspaper union spokesperson Jennifer Sheehan says there has been concern the first bidder Alden Global Capital would be more concerned with profit than local news.

“We are very aware that a lot can change and has been changing frequently. So I don’t know that we feel we are out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination but we feel it is good news,” Sheehan says. 

With the optimism comes hope. 

“Our information is that these two gentlemen will buy the company, and then sell the papers off to local investors. And to sell to the local investors it would be at a regular price it wouldn’t be at an inflated cost like if they were to buy it from Alden,” she says. 

Now they will have access to the Morning Calls finances, she says. 

“That’s been a big piece, kind of the missing piece for all of us trying to work on finding investors for our papers,” Sheehan says. 

Tribune Publishing owns seven other daily papers, including the Morning Calls sister paper, The Baltimore Sun.

Alden Global Capital who already owns 32% of Tribune Publishing was the original bidder, at $630 million.

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