• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, March 18, 2025

Many journalists distrust Alden Global Capital because of its alleged practice of reducing newsroom staffs. But Alden may be redeeming itself in some peoples' eyes with its fight against tech giants and their use of copyrighted material to train AI models.  

The publisher has run editorials in at least 60 of its newspapers, claiming that OpenAI and Google are seeking a “license to steal.” 

It’s strong stuff.

“OpenAI and Google — having long trained their ravenous bots on the work of newsrooms like this one — now want to throw out long-established copyright law by arguing, we kid you not, that the only way for the United States to defeat the Chinese Communist Party is for those tech giants to steal the content created with the sweat equity of America’s human journalists,” the editorial says.

OpenAI asked the Trump White House last week to loosen copyright protections. But Alden rejected that idea in its editorial. 

“Gutting generations of copyright protections for the benefit of AI bots would have a chilling effect not just on news organizations but also on all creative content creators, from novelists to playwrights to poets,” 

Last April, eight newspapers owned by Alden, including the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News, sued OpenAI, accusing it of  “purloining millions of the Publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment to fuel the commercialization of their generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) products, including ChatGPT and Copilot.” The case is dragging on.  

Alden Global Capital surely has a formidable legal team. Now it is using another weapon in its arsenal: the pages in its own newspapers.