On an afternoon in early January, David Jackson and Gary Marx, the Chicago Tribune’s premier investigative reporters, were huddled at a round table, making phone calls to some of the city’s economic élite. Jackson and Marx are in their early sixties and have been working together for ten years. Each answers the phone—“This is David and Gary”—as if they were a single entity. Marx is loud, with a boisterous laugh, and Jackson is only slightly more subdued; during interviews, when one of them is relentlessly asking questions, the other soaks up the atmosphere before joining in. In a conference room at the Tribune’s office, on the third floor of the Prudential Building, Marx opened a spreadsheet he’d put together—a list of eighty names—and dialled a source who runs a public-relations firm. After some opening pleasantries, the conversation turned to the possible fate of the newspaper, which Marx described as facing “an existential threat.”

In the final months of 2019, Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund that has a reputation for buying newspapers and stripping them of much of their staff, had acquired a large stake in Tribune Publishing, which amounted to thirty-two per cent of the company. Because of a standstill agreement, Alden can’t purchase any more shares until June, and so Jackson and Marx figured that they had little time to find someone—or perhaps a consortium of individuals—to buy and ultimately save the Tribune. The P.R. flack promised to reach out to a client who’s in private equity. “We’re dialling for dollars,” Marx explained. “Trying for miracles.”

It probably goes without saying: this is not a good time for local journalism. It’s been buffeted by a perfect storm of economic and cultural forces, including declining circulation, reduced ad revenue, and a choreographed assault on the media by President Trump. The past couple of months have been particularly dispiriting. The McClatchy Company, which publishes thirty papers, including the Miami Herald and the Sacramento Bee, declared bankruptcy. Trump, in his annual budget request, proposed slashing all funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by 2023, which would have an outsized impact on public-radio stations in small cities and towns. In January, Warren Buffett announced that he’d given up on the newspaper business, and his company initiated the sale of its portfolio of thirty-one newspapers. And now there are Alden’s efforts to purchase Tribune Publishing, which includes a number of other major newspapers such as the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Capital Gazette, in Annapolis, Maryland, where, two years ago, a gunman killed four journalists and another employee.

One of the fundamental roles of a newspaper is to offer an honest assessment of the world around us, so that we might make informed decisions. It helps create a common language, a common set of facts. That’s not to say that local papers like the Tribune always get it right. But, more often than not, the Tribune produces extraordinary work, from on-the-ground reporting about Chicago’s violence to dogged coverage of corruption in the Illinois state legislature. It’s not surprising that a majority of people still treasure their local-news outlets. In a recent study, the Knight Foundation found that six in ten Americans consider their local newspaper a symbol of civic pride.

The Tribune, the city’s largest newspaper, with a combined print and digital circulation of roughly four hundred and fifty thousand, has been through some trying times. At its peak, it employed just under seven hundred reporters and editors; today it has around two hundred and fifty. Recently, the paper has endured a series of bungling owners. “I feel like it’s been a clown car,” Jackson told me. First there was the real-estate tycoon Sam Zell, whose leadership antics were documented in a hair-raising story by the former New York Times columnist David Carr. According to two people present, a top executive hired by Zell offered a waitress at a bar a hundred dollars to expose her breasts (The top executive denied that this incident occurred.) Under Zell, the Tribune Company went into bankruptcy. The company later split up into two separate entities: Tribune Media and Tribune Publishing, the newspaper arm. Then came the local businessman Michael Ferro, who was convinced that artificial intelligence would change the news-gathering business—and renamed Tribune Publishing Tronc, which was universally ridiculed. (The comedian John Oliver said that it sounded “like the noise an ejaculating elephant makes.”) Ferro stepped down after being accused of sexual harassment.

Amid this turmoil, Jackson and Marx have produced some remarkable journalism, including a series, in 2018, about sexual assaults in Chicago’s public schools. But their effort to save their newspaper from Alden could put their jobs at risk. Two years ago, Alden, which had purchased the Denver Post, significantly reduced the size of the paper’s newsroom.

The paper’s editorial board responded by writing a blistering editorial, calling Alden “vulture capitalists.” When Chuck Plunkett, the editor of the editorial page, wrote a follow-up piece, a company executive spiked it, and Plunkett resigned. At the nearby Boulder Daily Camera, which was also purchased by Alden, the editorial-page editor was fired after self-publishing a piece upbraiding his new parent company. Blair Kamin, the Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, told me, “There’s considerable courage in what Gary and David are doing.”

As a sign of what’s to come under Alden, the newspaper offered buyouts to employees—both Jackson and Marx chose not to take their offers. In January, the reporters penned an Op-Ed for the Times, in which they wrote that, if Alden gains control, “Illinois’s most vulnerable people would lose a powerful guardian, its corrupt politicians would be freer to exploit and plunder, and this prairie metropolis would lose the common forum that binds together and lifts its citizens.” A top editor at the Tribune had warned them against writing the piece, noting that they could be disciplined or worse. Jackson, who is single, suggested to Marx, who has two children, that he could leave his name off the editorial. (Marx kept his name on the piece.)

For Marx and Jackson, the best scenario for the Tribune was to try to find someone to step forward and pluck the paper away from Alden—which, by some estimates, would cost between a hundred and a hundred and fifty million dollars. (Reporters at the Baltimore Sun have undertaken a similar effort.) So they put together a list of civic-minded individuals with deep pockets or high-profile connections who might appreciate the need for strong local journalism. They also began snooping around, as investigative reporters are apt to do, and uncovered the identities of several Alden investors. But when they made contact, they learned the investors no longer had money in Alden. When I asked how they found those investors, Jackson started to explain—“We used research services used by private-equity services”—before Marx interrupted him. “Let’s leave it at that,” he said.