Small story on these kind of takeovers, but on a MUCH, MUCH smaller scale:
Back home we have this small newspaper that's been going on for 25 years. It's just a small 3 man operation, and it's just a weekly paper that covers local stuff in our small county. Most of their customers are expats and older folks.
When they started out 25 years ago, they raised funds by selling private stocks. All in all, there are maybe 100 owners, many whom probably don't even remember that they own the stock (but you can easily find them, as we have pretty transparent laws when it comes to company ownership).
But here comes the fun part: A couple of years ago some of the leading media companies in our country (Norway) started consolidating "power" by acquiring small local newspapers all over the country. Eventually they came to our local newspaper, and they started cold-calling all the listed owners, asking if they could purchase their stocks - warning that the newspaper was on the brink of bankruptcy, and that they would buy it and restructure it into a profitable paper. Some owners, thinking the stock was going to be worthless anyway, sold them their shares.
They, of course, never told the majority owners any of this. The majority owner (the workers of the newspaper) started getting worried calls from senior/old readers if the newspaper was going to close, because some investors had been calling them with bad news about an impeding bankruptcy?
The paper printed a story about this attempted takeover and the fake news regarding any potential bankruptcy, and people stopped selling their stocks.
> A couple of years ago some of the leading media companies in our country (Norway) started consolidating "power" by acquiring small local newspapers all over the country.
This sounds like it should be a pretty big story. "Extremely dangerous to our democracy." On the other hand, it also sounds like it wouldn't be.
Back home we have this small newspaper that's been going on for 25 years. It's just a small 3 man operation, and it's just a weekly paper that covers local stuff in our small county. Most of their customers are expats and older folks.
When they started out 25 years ago, they raised funds by selling private stocks. All in all, there are maybe 100 owners, many whom probably don't even remember that they own the stock (but you can easily find them, as we have pretty transparent laws when it comes to company ownership).
But here comes the fun part: A couple of years ago some of the leading media companies in our country (Norway) started consolidating "power" by acquiring small local newspapers all over the country. Eventually they came to our local newspaper, and they started cold-calling all the listed owners, asking if they could purchase their stocks - warning that the newspaper was on the brink of bankruptcy, and that they would buy it and restructure it into a profitable paper. Some owners, thinking the stock was going to be worthless anyway, sold them their shares.
They, of course, never told the majority owners any of this. The majority owner (the workers of the newspaper) started getting worried calls from senior/old readers if the newspaper was going to close, because some investors had been calling them with bad news about an impeding bankruptcy?
The paper printed a story about this attempted takeover and the fake news regarding any potential bankruptcy, and people stopped selling their stocks.