It’s bad enough what the vulture capitalists at Alden Global Capital have done to the Denver Post, to its readers and to journalism as we once knew it.
But Alden, the rapacious hedge fund that owns/decimates newspapers across the country, including not a few across Colorado, hasn’t stopped there.
Of course it hasn’t. You don’t earn the title “vulture capitalist” without flaunting your enthusiasm for picking at what’s left of every available bone.
And so it won’t surprise you that, according to the latest update from BusinessDen, the Post — under its corporate name, DP Media Network LLC — now owes the city more than $5 million in unpaid rent plus penalties for the “Denver Post” building downtown, located in that prime real estate on Colfax Avenue, across the street from the state Capitol and Denver’s City and County Building.
That’s $5 million at a time when Denver has had to lay off more than 150 city workers and defund a too-long list of necessary city projects due to massive budget overruns. That’s $5 million that would at least have paid the one-time, severance-pay price for the laid-off city workers, which, coincidentally, cost the city, yes, $5 million.
Who did pay for it? That’s right, you did, if you live in Denver.
And, by the way, that’s $5 million and counting. Maybe this is the right time to, uh, borrow from the famous 1975 New York Daily News headline when President Gerald Ford refused funds for a struggling New York City — “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” We could just change the wording slightly to “Post to City: Drop Dead.”
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SUBSCRIBESo Alden didn’t just indirectly screw you over by leaving the Post and its long-suffering journalists with just enough resources to scrape by each day as a shell of its former self, it is directly screwing taxpayers by refusing to pay its rent of $650,000 a month as the building’s master leaseholder.
And apparently, Alden is going to continue to screw you over in its “little excursion” against the city. In a showdown that began in August, Alden wants to buy out the lease, which runs until 2029 — you think the vultures will be playing more than a little hardball with city? — and the city is threatening to sue the Post to get back, as Mayor Mike Johnston has said, “every last penny.”
Did the city make a bad deal when it bought the building in early 2024 for $89 million? It did — if it expected the villains from Alden to keep faith with Denver. Maybe it will work out anyway if Denver uses the building for city offices.
Why would anyone trust Alden? If only the documentary “Stripped for Parts” had been released at the time of the rental transaction.
The Post has not paid its rent since last August. Imagine. I know If we didn’t pay our rent for seven months or so, the repo man (or worse) would have stopped by the house long ago. And we’d be out in the street.
But, I guess, it’s too late for that.
Here’s the thing: The Denver Post logo may still stand across the top of the 11-story building, but it’s just a mirage. There’s no there there.
The Post doesn’t own the building. It never did. But it is still the leaseholder.
And for seven years, The Post hasn’t even occupied the building, having moved its journalists and taken the “Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire” to a printing plant in Adams County, which doesn’t exactly speak “empire” to me.
I know something about the building, which opened in 2006, having worked there for both the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. At the Rocky, we used to joke that everything would be better once we moved to the new building. (The old Rocky building, by the way, was remade into a large city jail complex. I guess the city has something going with former newspaper buildings.)
You know how the Rocky’s story ended. Less than three years after the building opened — and it is quite a nice building; I had a city and mountain view — the Rocky folded, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of readers and 149 years of history. Rocky alumni just celebrated, if that’s the right word, the 17th anniversary of the Rocky’s demise at the hands of its corporate owners.
The Post may have won the fabled newspaper war, but it’s hard to locate a winner just now.
I mean, until a few months ago, the city — which is a tenant at the building — had been paying rent to the Post. That’s how weird this story is.
According to CBS Colorado, which had filed an open records request from the city, Denver has stopped making its $166,000 monthly payment. And the city has also invoked a clause in the lease that makes other renters in the building, who are now subletters, pay rent directly to the city — and not to the Post.
“The city has exercised its right under the lease agreement to collect all rents and other payments due to DP Media Network from subleases in the building,” Laura Swartz, a spokesperson for Denver’s Department of Finance, told CBS Colorado. “Any sublease payments will now be made directly to the city. This includes keeping our own payments that we would have otherwise been making.”
And Johnston has authorized City Attorney Miko Brown to recover all the money the Post owes the city.
I wonder how that will turn out. Or how much leverage Denver actually has with a vulture hedge fund. I mean, it is possible that Alden would threaten to just pull the plug on the Post and strip it for whatever parts are left. Alden, I guess, could then just look for another victim to toy with.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Presumably Alden is still making money with the Post or it would have closed shop — or at least sold the paper — long ago.
A sale would be great news — so great that I’d even forgive the rent.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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