By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
New Hampshire Union Leader employees no longer have an ownership stake in the newspaper as the William Loeb Union Leader Trust was dissolved to help close its still opaque bailout deal.
Employees at New Hampshire’s only statewide print newspaper were recently told by former publisher Joe McQuaid the 50-year-old trust that gave them a 29 percent ownership stake is no more. That stake, according to McQuaid’s letter to employees, was valued at $50,000.
“We were as surprised as anyone else when we got the letter,” said retired UL staffer Mark Hayward.
Hayward is also a member of the New Hampshire News Guild, the union representing Union Leader journalists that demonstrated over wages and other issues in September of 2023.
Bill and Nackey Loeb established the employee trust in 1979, and Hayward said the intention was to eventually hand over control of the company to the employees.
“When I started at the UL in the 1990s, old timers would always say Bill Loeb always wanted us to take over at some point,” Hayward said. “Those were just stories.”
Hayward said there was nothing in writing spelling out the deal that he ever saw. Occasionally, employees would get a dividend check out of the blue, Hayward said.
“Those checks stopped coming after a while,” he said.
The trust was dissolved in order to sell the shares to new investors. The Union Leader has been struggling financially, but expects to start running profits with the new capital. The timing of the dissolution and share sale means employees were cashed out of their stake when their share was possibly at its lowest.
The trust was dissolved in early December, weeks before the company was set to get a state-backed bailout loan and two new investors/owners. When McQuaid and other shareholders voted to dissolve the trust and sell the shares to the new owners, that 29 percent stake in the company was valued at $50,457. McQuaid did not respond to a request for comment.
“The figure is derived from the company’s negative retained earnings and the auditor’s opinion questioning if it remains a ‘going concern,’” McQuaid wrote to employees about the dissolution of the trust.
If almost 30 percent of the Union Leader was worth $50,000, that appears to mean the whole Union Leader was worth about $174,000 as of Dec. 9 when the trust was dissolved. That’s a lot less than the $383,000 value the company has on IRS filings.
But by the end of December, the UL got a $1 million loan thanks to the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority, and at least another million in new money from Bob Singer and Greg Wendt. That kind of investment could have increased the value of the employee shares. As it is now, the UL’s 50 full-time employees will split the $50,457, once legal fees are deducted.
Singer is a Manchester resident and former president of Merchants Auto, and Wendt is an investor and partner at Capital Group Companies in San Francisco, California. They now both own a “substantial” stake in the Union Leader, along with the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications.
The Loeb School is the Loeb/McQuaid family non-profit which partially owned the newspaper for decades. McQuaid is the current president and chairman of the school’s board.
But who now owns how much of the Union Leader still isn’t clear. The exact amount of shares going to Wendt and Singer has not been disclosed, nor has the price per share they paid. Chief Financial Officer Joyce Levesque recently told members of the guild details like that are private.
“Regarding ownership changes, these changes are between private entities and are considered confidential,” Levesque wrote to the Guild.
But Hayward said a newspaper that prides itself on reporting the truth and being a champion of free speech, like the Union Leader, ought to be transparent in who is now running the operation.
“The readers deserve to know who owns their newspaper,” Hayward said.
