Four in the morning

1. Liberal columnist Frank Rich bails on New York Times, goes to New York magazine. NY

2. A map of 17 "muckraking" bloggers having an impact on world affairs. Daily Beast

3. The Denver Post continues to sue bloggers for using its content without permission - and catches a destitute writer in its dragnet. Westword

4. Los Angeles Times reporters Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives win the Seldin Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for their city of Bell stories. USC

Singleton: "the news side is my real passion"

Westword has a lengthy interview with Dean Singleton, who cites health issues and his age as the reason he decided to step down CEO of MediaNews Group. Singleton will stay on as executive chairman of the company and serve as publisher of the Denver Post and Salt Lake Tribune.

The interview offers hints about what's next for MediaNews. Consolidation, of course, is on the agenda. Singleton couches the consolidation plans in talk of expansion, which would indicate that mergers with are on the horizon too add to company's properties, since even he can't spin shrinking as a form of growth.

He also talks about mobile and social media strategies, which MediaNews has been working on some time. And Singleton offers a more cautious view of pay walls than I've read before:

"We're experimenting with pay walls, but there's no certainty pay walls are going to work," he concedes. "The best reason to have a pay wall is that it sends a message to consumers that all information is not free. And I think having sent the message for fifteen years that it is, we need to send a different message -- that all information isn't free. Although you can't have a total pay wall, because we're generating a lot of traffic, and a lot of revenue, for the content we have."

MediaNews has already outlined a strategy where features, sports and some user-generated content would go behind pay walls, with breaking news still free. But the statement above, along with the desire to merge operations with other papers, makes me wonder if MediaNews wants to limit pay walls to niche content, such as Politico has done with its Politico Pro.

Then there is Singleton's homage to news, a sentiment most people who work (or worked) on the news side would have liked to have seen in practice when he was wielding the axe:

"Newspapering is my primary love, and the news side is my real passion. Having been a CEO for 27 years at MediaNews and for eight years prior to that for another company that I didn't own, I've been a newspaper CEO for 35 years. And I've been very much a businessman, because that's what you have to do to build a company. I love the business side of newspapering, no question. But my first love is and always has been the news side. And I don't have any intentions of drawing a breath of life outside of newspapering."

A nice career epitaph. I'm not sure it will stick.

Dial tones for debtors

MediaNews Group, doing business under the name Affiliated Media, is set to enter bankruptcy court on March 4. Before it does, it has made a few requests of the judge in the case. First, the company doesn't want to have to sign checks "Debtor-in Possesion." Second, and more important to people working in the chain's newsrooms, it wants to keep the phones and the Internet working.

From the Denver Daily:

MediaNews asked Judge Kevin J. Carey in a 23-page brief that “the debtor (MediaNews) cannot continue its operations without the continued services of the utility provider. Any disruption of the utility services supplied by the utility provider, for even a brief period, would be extremely costly to the debtor and harmful to its business.”

(Found via Westword)

Singleton interviewed

MediaNews Group owner Dean Singleton on Friday answered a few questions from Michael Roberts at Westword about newspapers and financial turmoil in the industry. For one thing, Singleton said too much of the media coverage concerning papers has been of the sky-is-falling variety, and doesn't fully take into account the unprecedented nature of the economic downturn:

I'm still very confident that the newspaper industry will not only survive but will thrive over time. In a bit of a different model, but it still will. And I think the print newspaper will thrive over time. The problems of newspapers, in my view, are very mis-covered by media analysts today. They don't understand the difference between a severe economic downturn, the most severe we've seen in my lifetime, and structural change. There are both going on. There's structural change going on, and it has been for several years, and that will change our business model. But the majority of the revenue declines we're seeing in 2009 are plain, old economic downturn.

Asked about a recent memo saying MediaNews might charge for some online content, Singleton said, in part:

If we begin to wean our locally produced content off our free sites, then I think we can drive people to pay for some of that content. It's not going to be a panacea. But we can't continue to give all of our content away for free on the web and expect people to buy it in print and in E-editions. ...

When we look at why people quit buying the newspaper, it's overwhelmingly because "I can get it for free online." So what we need to do is to continue having a very vibrant free site that's full of user-generated copy and information about where to eat and shows that are available and other things. But we need it not to include all of our locally produced news. And that's kind of where we're trying to go.

Given Singleton's stake in newspapers nationally, and especially here in California, the entire interview (here) well worth reading.