The Times has a nice story on Dean Singleton’s MediaNews and the problems it’s facing in this atrocious time for newspapers.
“In retrospect, the timing was not good,” said Mr. Singleton, the head of and a major shareholder in the company, which is privately held. “But in our business, you buy newspapers when they’re for sale. If we could have foreseen the current economic downturn in the state, it might have changed our views, but we couldn’t foresee that.”
It was hardly a minority opinion at the time that MediaNews and others were overpaying for papers. But what did that matter when “in our business, you buy newspapers when they’re for sale”? Get this guy his own Welch/Iacocca-style business how-to book!
Singleton is known for being a staff cutter, but in fairness, it seems like it would have been hard not to gut the San Jose Mercury News with numbers like these:
At the peak of the dot-com boom, The Mercury News had more than $100 million a year in help-wanted classified ads; this year, executives say, the figure will be around $10 million.
Still, the Times report shows that MediaNews has underinvested in the paper’s Web site, which is an area whose readership is more Web-savvy than any other.
Mr. Butler, the editor, said that with money tight, Web improvements have to wait. “Until or unless we see that those things pay for themselves, we make a serious mistake in focusing too much on that,” he said.
Lots of businesses don’t pay for themselves on day one. That’s no excuse not to try.
Mr. Chittum, I think your assessment about the San Jose Mercury News may be mis-focused. I live in the Bay Area and am a subscriber to the Contra Costa Times, which is also part of MediaNews, since the sell-off of the Knight-Ridder chain. In fact, MediaNews currently owns and operates 12 newspapers in cities near the Mercury News. In fact, the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek has probably the most up to date press facility in the area. It, the Mercury News and the Oakland Tribune probably comprise the flagships of the operation.
When discussing MediaNews' business situation, you should probably be asking whether the Mercury News is really the profit center or whether all 12 newspapers should be considered a single, giant profit center. All these papers share reportage, commentators, sports coverage and such. To some extent they may even share classified advertising, though they may localize that. In a real sense, though, these 12 are like little clones, allowing again for localizing; yet they are basically regional editions of the same paper.
So when assessing MediaNews's success or failure in the Bay Area, I think it would be more useful and more understandable to the reader for you to insist on a combined statement from them. After all, given the number of outlets, they are not really competing with anyone but themselves.
The twelve are:
Alameda Times-Star (Alameda)
The Argus (Fremont)
The Daily Review (Hayward)
Contra Costa Times (Contra Costa-- Walnut Creek, Concord)
Marin Independent Journal (Marin - San Rafael)
Milpitas Post (Milpitas)
Oakland Tribune (Oakland)
Pacifica Tribune (Pacifica)
San Jose Mercury News (San Jose)
San Mateo County Times
Times-Herald (Vallejo)
Tri-Valley Herald (Pleasanton)
Posted by Jim Kennedy on Tue 16 Dec 2008 at 02:19 AM