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.)