The East Bay Times is owned by MediaNews Group (MNG), a conglomerate that owns over 90 local newspapers across the country. In 2010, Alden reportedly acquired a sizeable chunk of shares in MNG, giving it control over the East Bay Times along with 200 other newspapers.
Neil Chase, who was a senior editor for the Times beginning in 2016, describes what happened to the paper after its Pulitzer Prize victory: “A lot of folks assumed that the Pulitzer Prize means they’re going to be happy with us and they’ll [Alden] take better care of us, and we won’t have more layoffs. And then a week or two later, we had to announce twenty people being fired.”
He further added, “Winning a Pulitzer Prize doesn’t change the economics of the company, so why would it change the attitude of the owners?”.
Eventually, the East Bay Times saw the number of staffers on its payroll drop from 380 employees to 250. Upon Chase leaving the paper in 2018, the total number of staff was at a staggeringly low of 160. In other words, Chase’s paper was utterly gutted, leaving employees with few alternative job options in an already declining industry.
