Federal Pension Insurer Will Survive Collapsing Media Landscape

Headline-grabbing media deals such as McClatchy Co.’s looming bankruptcy and Gannett’s cost savings-centric reorg (including widespread layoffs) are unlikely to exhaust the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, former administration aides say.

If anything, seasoned professionals said, the 45-year-old pension insurer could draw from lessons learned while intervening elsewhere—including billions of dollars devoted to sustaining commercial airlines, coal mining operations, and steel mills—to chart a way forward for struggling publishers.

The self-funded agency, which collects premiums from pension plan sponsors, is running a surplus on the single-employer side, while the multiemployer program faces insolvency by 2025. The single employer program ...