Stalled negotiations in bid for OC Register stall again

Europe is always doing something. And this time, that something is being blamed for delaying the sale of the Orange County Register.

According to the Wall Street Journal, MediaNews Group's $350 million bid to buy the Register and the rest of Freedom Communications's newspaper holdings stalled because of instability in the markets caused by the European debt crisis.

Talks stalled earlier this year over price, but apparently MediaNews, through a number of cost-cutting actions, offered enough money to get Freedom on board. The Journal says talks might resume in a few weeks, if the markets calm down a bit.

Long Beach Press-Telegram update

Three newsroom employees at the Long Beach Press-Telegram lost jobs this week as their departments were absorbed into the Daily Breeze. According to the Long Beach Post, sports columnist Frank Burlison and photographers Steven Georges and Diandra Jay received pink slips. (This post clarifies an earlier post.)

One big BANG

MediaNews Group owns two clusters of newspapers in California: the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG) and the Bay Area News Group (BANG). In the past decade, mergers and consolidation have turned the individual papers into something of a news blob, with each newsroom producing its own pages in semi-autonomous fashion, but often sharing substantial resources, including inside news and business pages, copy editors, photo, and advertising.

The Bay Area News Group, which owns newspapers in the East Bay, Silicon Valley and San Jose, has finally shed the pretension of autonomy and has named itself a single editorial entity.

According to a memo obtained by blogger Richard Brenneman, the BANG papers, led by editor Dave Butler, will now share a single managing editor for print, Bert Robinson, and a single managing for online, breaking news and photography, Randall Keith. Robinson and Keith served in similar capacities at the BANG flagship, the San Jose Mercury News.

Sports, photo and business will similarly fall under a single BANG editor.

This will mean more sharing of content between papers, though it's not clear if further staff cuts will follow. The papers, which include the Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times, will retain their editorial boards to run opinion and commentary.

From the memo:

Beginning today, we are taking another significant step in streamlining our organization to maximize our operating efficiency. Continuing the process that began with the creation of the Bay Area News Group, the news divisions of all Bay Area News Group newspapers will now operate under a single, common management team under the direction of Dave Butler, editor of the Mercury News and vice president for news for MediaNews Group. This move follows similar consolidations in our other divisions. 

Dave’s appointment and the announcement of the first official BANG-wide news management team are logical next steps in our efforts to make full use of the breadth and depth of the entire group. While a less-formal arrangement has been in place for some time, our recently negotiated labor agreements recognize complete consolidation. 

This reorganization will have an immediate impact on top management, and it’s with regret that we also announce that [BANG Executive Editor] Kevin Keane and [BANG-Easy Bay Managing Editor] Pete Wevurski are leaving the company today. Please join with me in thanking them for their years of service and wishing them well in their new adventures.

The rest of the memo is here.

No national consolidation plan, Singleton says

Dean Singleton, who's still the voice of MediaNews Group, put out a statement late today saying the newspaper chain has no plans for a national copy desk, despite a union letter warning of just such a proposal. He blames the union for jumping the gun, based on a casual conversation, and adds that this is why he doesn't include the guild in any planning sessions.

Romenesko also got hold of a memo sent from Dave Butler, head of MNG's California papers, that also says no national copy desk is planned, but indicates more regional clustering is probable. I'm reprinting the memos here, both taken from the Romenesko website. First Dave, then Dean:

Fellow MNG editors: 

FYI. I spoke to Dean Singleton this afternoon about the statement put out by the Guild regarding a national copy editing center. Below is his response to their press release. I would further add that we have two projects going on that fly in the face of any “national” center. We have consultant Ken Harding working with editors in Denver, Salt Lake and St. Paul to figure out ways to make local news production more efficient at each paper, and just yesterday a group from BANG went to LANG to exchange ideas on how we might streamline our regional desks. We also have some mini-regional desks around the company and may, at some point, consider more. Like most other newspaper companies, regionalization — where appropriate — seems to work well. Would we rule out doing something else? Nope. But the capital costs of one center and the challenges involved seem pretty daunting to me. Please share this information as is appropriate. 

-Dave 

******* 

Dean’s statement:
The Newspaper Guild on Friday issued a press release referring to a casual phone conversation I had with Bernie Lunser, president of the Guild, concerning the future of the newspaper industry and how newspapers can better serve their readers in print, online and on mobile products. 

Contrary to the assertions made in the release, there are no plans for “national consolidation” of MNG’s editing processes. 

While we constantly assess better ways to serve our readers in this changing and uncertain world, including the Guild in these considerations are not a part of those assessments.
The irresponsible Guild press release is a perfect example of why we don’t. 

There is no future for any of us if we continue to live in the past. Someone should tell that to the Guild. 

- Dean

MediaNews consolidation plans pick up speed

The universal copy desk is on the march. Already implemented within the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, parent-company MediaNews Group has approached the Newspaper Guild about the potential for similar consolidation plans on a national level. Whether the company wants consolidated copy desks at regional hubs, as Gannett has planned, or something more drastic remains to be seen.

The changes would undoubtedly save money, make it easier to share content and allow for the outsourcing of some functions. It would also make it easier to implement chain-wide changes, such as adopting an MNG mobile news service or a pay wall strategy. And, of course, it would make any other consolidation or merger proposals easier to implement.

The guild press release follows:

MEDIANEWS APPROACHES GUILD ABOUT POTENTIAL PRODUCTION CONSOLIDATION

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FEB. 11, 2011

 

WASHINGTON, DC -- MediaNews Group Executive Chairman Dean Singleton has contacted national leadership of The Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America (TNG-CWA) to discuss a potential national consolidation of the company's copy desks, pagination and front-end production.

 

We are seeking additional information from MediaNews to better understand what is being considered. At this point, we have no information to assess the timing of such a change, how many newspapers might be affected, or what such a radical shift in production would mean for current employees.

 

A union task force is being established consisting of leaders from all the Guild-represented work sites at MediaNews, including locations in Denver; York, Pa.; Northern and Southern California; and St. Paul, Minn. We hope to reach out to newsrooms at non-represented MediaNews operations as well. Our goal is to preserve jobs and quality journalism while engaging constructively with MediaNews.

 

We will keep our members and communities informed as we learn more details.

 

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Bernie Lunzer, TNG-CWA President, 202-434-7175

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.

Union meh*

The union representing employees at MediaNews Group's Northern California newspapers has struck a deal that sounds a lot like what non-union employees in the chain's Southern California newspapers got - a week-long furlough and a vacation freeze in exchange for a wobbly pledge not to lay anyone off. FishbowlLA has the story here.

*Correction: As a comment rightly points out, the non-union LANGers will be forced to take 10 furlough days, not five as stated above.

Some MediaNews ads go on autopilot

The Bay Area News Group, which is part of the MediaNews Group empire, has signed a deal with Wire2 to install software that will allow realtors to create their own open house ads on the newspaper chains' websites and will sync up with obituary information on Legacy.com, reports News and Tech. From the story:

Ad Hawk Open Homes lets real estate agents oversee the design and placement of their own ads without requiring the need to talk to an ad rep. BANG hopes to have half its open-house ads converted to self-service by March and 90 percent by year-end.

The Obituaries site integrates obituary information with a listing on Legacy.com. More than 30 area funeral homes have already signed up to use the portal.

This is how they do more with less.

Singleton hires muscle to enforce intellectual property rights

Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group has hired a Las Vegas firm to file legal challenges against what the newspaper company defines as copyright infringement. Wired magazine reports:

Las Vegas–based Righthaven was formed this spring for the sole purpose of acquiring copyrights and suing to financially benefit from allegedly misappropriated intellectual property. It has filed more than 180 suits on behalf of Stephens Media’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, and has now begun suing on behalf of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which owns the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post and about two dozen other outlets.

Righthaven’s initial lawsuit on behalf of the Denver Post, first reported by the Las Vegas Sun, came three weeks after the paper published online a “notice to readers about Denver Post copyright protections.” The five-paragraph notice said the newspaper’s work “is illegally reproduced everyday on websites across the country.” The company wrote it was acceptable for blogs to “reproduce no more than a headline and up to a couple of paragraphs or summary of the story.”

The crackdown promises to get more aggressive as MediaNews prepares to build paywalls around its newspaper sites.

Freedom for sale

Freedom Communications, owner of the Orange County Register, is up for sale; the company emerged from bankruptcy just eight months ago. Freedom reportedly plans to sell itself in a chunk, rather thank breaking pieces off. So who wants to buy a medium-size media company? A merger with MediaNews Group wouldn't be out of the question...

LANG has phone and Internet troubles

Not good news on Election Day. LANG's nine newspapers reportedly have been suffering intermittent phone and Internet service outages today.

LANG likes Facebook, mobile apps

The nine newspapers in the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG) plan to use Facebook's commenting system. Readers will have to sign into their Facebook accounts to leave a message at the bottom of a story. The system should make it easy to offer a comment, as long as the reader has a Facebook account; editors also hope to the system discourages people from leaving nasty comments since Facebook provides a link on the person's Facebook page.

Here's part of the memo from San Bernardino Sun/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin editor Frank Pine:

Just a heads up that we’re planning to make a fairly significant change to all of our websites in the very near future: We’ll be switching our commenting functions from Topix to Facebook. BANG is already doing this on insidebayarea.com, and it’s a substantial improvement over what we have here in that it makes commenting much easier, and by linking the comments to users’ Facebook accounts, it cuts down the more objectionable anonymous comments. While the traditional thinking is that requiring registration or real names with comments reduces traffic, insidebayarea.com has actually seen an increase in traffic and referral traffic from Facebook.

The memo goes on to say LANG is working on mobile phone apps for each of the newspapers and will soon get started on apps for computer tablets.

More circulation numbers for LANG

Here are more circulation numbers for LANG's nine newspapers (still two missing):

Pasadena Star-News: daily rose 2.13 percent to 24,480; Sunday rose 0.34 percent to 27,133

San Gabriel Valley Tribune: daily rose 11.19 percent to 37,123; Sunday rose 2.29 percent

Whittier Daily News: daily rose 9.86 percent to 14,365; Sunday rose 0.85 percent to 15,118

Inland Valley Daily Bulletin: daily rose 2.6 percent to 49,268; Sunday rose 1.3 percent to 55,277

San Bernardino Sun: daily grew 11.2 percent to 52,273; Sunday grew 3.9 percent to 57,150

Redlands Daily Facts: daily rose 5 percent to 6,940; Sunday rose 25 percent to 7,072

I have not seen numbers for the Long Beach Press-Telegram or Daily Breeze in Torrance.

As noted yesterday, the LA Daily News saw a 0.14 percent rise in daily circulation, to 89,093 papers, and a Sunday increase of 3.9 percent, to 97,000.

The numbers consist of print and online subscriptions to the papers. Last year, LANG launched e-editions of its printed papers (essentially .pdfs) and the strategy has bucked up the numbers for at least some papers. For example, the Sun would have dropped 3.5 percent in Sunday circulation if the e-edition hadn't been counted.

Are the e-editions subscriptions as profitable as subscriptions to the print edition?

LANG inches up

The newspapers in LANG saw circulation rise slightly, according to the LA Daily News. Sunday circulation rose 1 percent for the nine papers, to 428,100. It was up 3 percent on weekday, to an average of 408,200.

The story does not break out numbers for individual papers.

The Daily News, which is the largest of the nine LANG papers, did provide it's own circulation numbers. From the story:

The Los Angeles Daily News saw its Sunday circulation increase nearly 3.9 percent to 97,000 during the six months that ended Sept. 30, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to figures released Monday. 

The same report by the Audit Bureau of Circulations recorded a 0.14 percent increase in the paper's average daily circulation to 89,093.

MediaNews Group to hire

LA Observed got the memo that MediaNews Group plans to hire two state reporters, one covering the Capitol and the other covering Silicon Valley. This is good news for all papers in the chain - and an opportunity for reporters toiling at regional political beats to finally have a chance at climbing the ladder and putting their experience to good use. These are positions I wish existed when I worked for the chain (MediaNews would probably set my resume on fire at this point).

Press-Telegram gets a new editor

The Long Beach Press-Telegram will undergo a major personnel change on the editorial side at the end of the month. Rich Archbold, who has served as the newspaper's executive editor since 1997 and managing editor for 19 years before that, is leaving his job to become "community liaison director" - meaning he'll be the public face of the paper at community and civic events. Sue Schmitt, a former editor of the Daily Breeze in Torrance, will take over in a dual role as editor and general manager of the Press-Telegram. The press releases are here and here.

New publisher for the Desert Sun

Gannett has named Mark Winkler publisher of the Desert Sun in Palm Springs effective Sept. 27. Winkler will replace Rich Ramhoff, who was hustled out of the position earlier this month.

Winkler comes to Gannett from Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group, where he served as chief of sales and chief marketing officer. One has to wonder whether his move to inland Southern California, a region saturated by MediaNews newspapers, is a sign of a developing partnership with the Singleton's Los Angeles Newspaper Group.

In addition to being publisher of the Desert Sun, "he will also hold the position of West Group vice president with oversight responsibility for the U.S. Community Publishing markets in Visalia, Tulare, Salinas, CA, and Guam," according to Marketwatch.

Here's more on his business background:

Prior to Winkler's work at Media News Group, he served as chief operating officer for Capital Securities Real Estate, LLC, a global real estate investments fund. From 2000-2006, Winkler was a division vice president/general manager for Comcast Communications and from 2004-2006 had oversight of corporate interactive and new sales technologies for Comcast. From 1997-2000, he served as a Western Region vice president for Media One, Los Angeles, CA. Winkler is a cum laude graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Nix leaving the Breeze

Daily Breeze reporter Denise Nix is leaving the paper to work for the child-advocacy group First 5 LA. Nix covered the courts for the South Bay newspaper and won this year's distinguished journalist award from the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to the Breeze, Nix worked for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and the Associated Press.

Here's part of the goodbye memo from city editor Frank Suraci:

Denise's award this year from SPJ capped off a stellar career here at the Breeze. Not only has she done a yeoman's job tracking all our court cases and handling the day-to-day grind, but Denise has covered some major cases for us over the years as well as helped initiate our popular Crime+Courts blog with Larry [Altman].

We'll miss her hard work and dedication but wish her all the best in her new venture.

MediaNews to start building walls

Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group will begin its experiment with paywalls sometime next month, the industry trade publication News and Tech reports.

From the story:

The publisher will use the Enterprise Record in Chico, Calif., and the York (Pa.) Daily Record and York Dispatch to evaluate paywalls, according to David Bessen, IT director and Howard Saltz, editorial director, at MediaNews Group Interactive. ...

MNG is calling its model "member zones." Consumers will be able to read up to 10 stories for free each month before they are asked to begin paying for access.

More details to come.

Haakenson opts out

Long Beach Press-Telegram sports editor Joe Haakenson has decided to quit his job rather than take a pay cut and be moved out to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, two sources say. Haakenson, a long-time Angels beat writer for LANG before taking the editor's post in 2006, apparently would have lost his title in the move and forced another person out of a job.