Dean Singleton, hypocrite of the dying news biz

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a graphics-heavy piece about how larger and mid-sized regional daily papers continue to bleed both circ and ad money.

In it, Dean Singleton, founder of Media News, eventually acquired by Dead Fucking Media related to a Media News bankruptcy, followed by further bankruptcies of DFN, which is now owned by hedge fund Alden Capital, said:

“What Alden is doing is liquidating,” said Dean Singleton, who founded the company that now forms the crux of MNG Enterprises and pioneered several newspaper cost-cutting measures, but who is no longer associated with the company. “They are taking the cash out as quickly as they can and reinvesting in businesses they think have more promise. It may be a very good business strategy, but it is not a good newspaper strategy.”

Problem is, Dean, you did this and similar yourself.

Anecdote has it that, decades ago, after you bought your hometown Graham (Texas) Leader, and the chamber of commerce head or someone said, "Great, we don't have to worry about cuts to our paper now" or something like that, you allegedly said "Don't count on it."

Non-anecdote has you closing the Fort Worth Press and Houston Post after acquiring them. Ditto for the Dallas Times Herald.

As chair of AP's board of directors in the mid-1990s, you touted the "TV model" for online papers, ignoring the existence of pay cable channels more than 15 years old by then.

As a result of this, you underpriced AP feed to Yahoo and other early news aggregators, setting the stage for everybody getting their wire news online now, and finding it unpaywalled somewhere.

Between the two, the "TV model" and the related underpricing of AP news, many people "learned" that Stewart Brand was right about information wanting to be free. But they ignore the whole paragraph of Brand's full quote:

(Brand himself claims he's blamed for a lot of tech-neoliberalism stuff that is not his fault. The rest of that interview indicates he's lying to himself if he really believes that and lying to the rest of us anyway.)

And, cuz Merika and race to the bottom capitalism, the fight was never equal, especially when Deano put one thumb on the scale of free.

That was after putting his thumb on the "free" of tax writeoffs and other reasons for closing the papers he did above. (The Fort Worth Press was in its second incarnation, for example, and losing money when Dean bought it, almost certainly for tax purposes first.)

Snooze takes bath on resale of Belo building

Last fall, after moving out of the historic Belo Building, AND not even spending money to move "The Rock" to its rented digs, the, I am sorry, The Dallas Morning News sold the building for $33 million.

Although nobody would officially tie this to Amazon's national Grifting for Dollars work as it hunted for a second headquarters, which it eventually of course split into two parts and has now pulled back on the NYC part, everybody saw it that way, especially since KDC and Hoque backed out soon after Amazon said sorry to Dallas.

Well, the Snooze has now sold it again.

For $5 million less.

In addition, original buyer KDC said that if it resold to Amazon, the Snooze would get a cut. New buyer Ray Washburne made no such pledge, even though, technically, Amazon could come calling. He's also paying less than $6M of it up front.

There's that anti-Midas touch at work!

Per that second link, which is from D Magazine, it seems hard not to see a push by an activist shareholder for Belo to go private and/or sell the paper as being behind this in some way. A letter from said shareholder notes that Belo's digital marketing has tanked even more than the paper itself.

I think, re the digital marketing, what we have is a signature moment mix of Belo arrogance and Belo stupidity. That said, said activist investor could have found 15-20 straight years of semi-regular occurrences of that; nobody forced him to buy his shares.

Advance surrenders in NOLA

It really should be no surprise.

The Baton Rouge Advocate, having started a New Orleans edition several years ago when Advance, owners of the venerable New Orleans Times-Picayune, made noises, then did it, about getting rid of a 7-day print product, or at least a 7-day print product for home delivery, has now bought the TP. (IF you're going to do something like this? Don't piss off subscribers. Instead, even though you're delivering in volume, whack everyday delivery to racks and retailers instead. Advertisers would probably prefer to reach dedicated customers, too.)

The takeover is brutal for NOLA staffers — all of them were sacked and will have to reapply. The Georges family would have come off better at saying "we'll look at staffing needs," and hired all op-ed staff immediately on a contract basis, along with section editors off the copy desk and selected top staffers otherwise, while saying "we'll get back to you" on the rest.

On the third hand, per the official announcement, the Advocate had its own, well-sized for today's newspaper world, staff.

But in terms of the big picture, the only question I have is — what took this so long? Did Advance not face reality? (As soon as the Advocate announced a New Orleans edition, it took off like white on rice in jambalaya.) The officially announcement said that NOLA was not for official sale but that Advance saw the handwriting on the wall.

For the Georges ownership, it makes great sense. They launched a paper in Lafayette a few years back and own an alt-weekly in NOLA. And, contra a NOLA TV station, the TP had ceased to be a gold standard at least since the 2012 circ decision. (Oh, pro tip to the TV interviewer? Turn your cellphone off before starting an interview. And, if the interview itself was done on cellphone video cam? Pro tip to station: stop being so fucking cheap.)

So, why isn't this happening elsewhere? Why doesn't the Akron Beacon Journal roll the dice on a Cleveland issue and see if Advance and the Plain Dealer will surrender? Ditto on whatever the paper is in Vancouver, Washington, (it's the Columbian) versus the Oregonian? Especially since Advance's company-wide transition to being allegedly digital-first has been as slow as hell.

Moser strikes again!

Just two months after the Sulphur Springs News-Telegram's parent, Southern Newspapers, was reportedly going to shut the press there and move the pressmen to the older press at its sister paper in Paris, Moser Community Media, which owns the neighboring paper in Mount Pleasant, has bought it.

With extensive time at Southern, and knowing Moser, here's a few thoughts.

1. Within six months, SS will move from a tri-weekly to a semi-weekly, as MtP is now.

2. The magazine in SS will cut back to bi-monthly, if not quarterly. I don't think Moser will kill it, but he's not a fan of mags.

3. Special sessions will increase.

4. The agricultural tabloid run out of Sulphur Springs, Country World? That could increase. Southern was complete idiots with it, never trying to get other papers in their chain to sell into it, then at the local level, eventually firing its long-time ad rep. Moser may well address the former head-on. I could see that bumping from 16 to 20 pages if done right.

5. Rather than a local magazine, with the amount of papers he now owns in NE Texas, the SS magazine might become something regional, and becoming a locally printed tab, not an outsourced slick.

Why did Southern buy Sulphur Springs in the first place? Per others, I agree that former Paris publisher J.D. Davidson talked them into it. Davidson is also responsible for the current ME being there, and many former employees wonder why. Stay tuned on that issue, as far as what changes Moser makes editorially. A person with long media experience, at a TCU journalism conference last Friday, was not impressed by the paper there, and I may be understating things.

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Update: Within three weeks, Moser has whacked the six-page second section of the 18-page, 3x a week paper. The one section will print on three days a week, which cuts press hours. And, they're kind of upset on the press, especially since they may have lost at least one contract print job, for whatever reason.

Papers will now be mail only. Deadlines for the post office will be a lot easier to meet with just one section. But, that means contract carriers are all gone. It also means that circulation is very much a part-time position. Other cuts have been made or will be made.

I got out very much at the right time. So did others who left.

None of this surprises me.

I say that paper could be a five-day daily, especially with Moser running Mount Pleasant as well. Cross-pollination on news coverage abounds on sharing local news relevant to the other city, regional news that just one of the two papers can cover, etc.

And you could do this within a mail delivery system for the post office while getting rid of carriers.

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Update 2, June 14: In six weeks, Moser has partially paywalled the paper, something Southern and its Deputy Dawg ITers, led by Greg Monroe, couldn't get around to doing in two years.