With Deal For McClatchy, Kansas City Star Will See Its Fifth Owner In Four Decades [View all]

Chatham Asset Management already has investments in a stable of newspapers, including a major stake in the parent company of The National Enquirer supermarket tabloid.


The McClatchy Company, the nation’s second largest newspaper chain and the owner of The Kansas City Star, Wichita Eagle, Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer and more than two dozen other daily newspapers, announced on Sunday that Chatham Asset Management had submitted the winning bid for the company at a bankruptcy auction.

McClatchy, burdened by debt it incurred in 2006 when it bought newspaper chain Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion and by pension obligations to 24,000 employees and retirees, sought Chapter 11 protection in February in the Southern District of New York.

Who is Chatham Asset Management?

Chatham is a $4.4 billion hedge fund based in New Jersey. It is McClatchy’s biggest creditor and shareholder. The company, which was founded in 2002, is secretive; its managing partner, Anthony Melchiorre, a one-time head of Morgan Stanley’s junk bond trading division, almost never grants interviews.

In a profile of Chatham last year, Fortune magazine said that during his stint at Morgan Stanley, Melchiorre “could be foul-mouthed and loud, and would berate fellow traders as he bopped around the trading floor in his stocking feet.”

Read more: https://www.kcur.org/news/2020-07-13/with-deal-for-mcclatchy-kansas-city-star-will-see-its-fifth-owner-in-four-decades