All entries tagged: Denver Post
Singleton’s next chapter: Can he steer MediaNews to a digital future?
[Our regular contributor Martin Langeveld spent 13 years as a publisher in MediaNews Group. That gives him an inside perspective on the company's bankruptcy filing, which he shares with us here. —Ed.]
In August 2006, as part of a deal that netted MediaNews Group the Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Hearst Corporation agreed to make a $300 million equity investment in MediaNews. At that point, the peak of MediaNews’ company’s expansion and with revenue and cash flow at an all-time high, the holdings of the principal stockholders — the Singleton and Scudder families — net of debt, were arguably worth more than $500 million each.
But last Friday, whatever was left of that equity, as well as Hearst’s stake (not finalized until a year later), evaporated as part of an announced plan to file a “prepackaged” Chapter 11 bankruptcy. For Hearst, it’s a hefty writeoff of a bad investment. For the Scudders, it’s a bitter payoff after nearly 25 years of active participation in MediaNews management. For MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton and his financial wizard, company president Joseph (Jody) L. Lodovic IV, it’s a fresh start (which includes a 20 percent equity stake for the duo, and retained control of the company).
Could readers of the company’s papers now see new investment in its newsgathering capabilities, long hammered by budget reductions? For MediaNews employees, could this be an opportunity to participate in the transformation of the company into a truly digital enterprise? Both answers depend on what kind of vision is shared by Singleton, Lodovic, and the former bondholders who are now their equity partners. Keep reading »
Inside the Rockies: How ex-RMN reporters are using comments to build community around baseball
If you’re a Colorado Rockies fan, you can follow your team in any number of ways. There are the obvious national outlets, the Associated Press, the hometown Denver Post, and — before this year’s spring training at least — the Rocky Mountain News, R.I.P. Then there are the television networks and radio stations, and, perhaps most significantly, a growing gauntlet of coverage from Major League Baseball itself from MLB.com. That seems like a pretty saturated market, and we haven’t even broached the many Rockies blogs, fan sites, and message boards, or the community and regional blogs that occasionally join the fray. There’s no shortage of information about the Rockies.
And yet, some of the reporters who know the Rockies better than anyone are working for still another news organization — one they created with that exact saturation in mind. Inside The Rockies — a reported blog launched two days after the Rocky’s closing by the newspaper’s beat writers, Tracy Ringolsby and Jack Etkin, and its assistant sports editor for interactive, Steve Foster — doesn’t aim to supplant the competition. Their goal is to guide the conversation around the Rockies.
Most of the site’s dispatches are short, some as brief as a sentence. The writers aggregate national and local news, and instead of filing traditional game stories, a typical game recap is more of a cross between summary, infographic and notebook. The writers’ contributions are meant, in part, to kickstart the give-and-take in the comments section, where all three are active participants. Keep reading »
Back to the future: MediaNews revives “print your own newspaper”
In an approach rather different from Microsoft’s vision of content delivery in the future, which I described yesterday, MediaNews Group has announced plans for I-News, a system that will print your own customized newspaper on your own printer:
The “individuated” stories selected by each reader are sent to a special printer being developed for MediaNews that each customer would have at home. The printer will format the stories and print them or send them to a computer or mobile phone for viewing later in the day.
Ads will be delivered as well. Where possible, the ads will be matched to each reader’s choice of stories. For example, a reader who selects high school sports stories might receive ads from retail sports stores, or skiers might receive ski-related ads.
Moreover, MediaNews suggests, once this notion takes hold, the company might only have to print and deliver actual newspapers three days a week:
Our greatest expense is printing and delivering a newspaper,” [MediaNews executive V.P. for sales and marketing Mark] Winkler said. “Eliminating it four days a week would be significant.
Haven’t we seen this before? Yes indeed. It was in 1939 that radio station W9XZY, owned by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, inaugurated a trial of the first daily newspaper edition transmitted by radio signals to giant facsimile printers located in homes. (See illustration at top of this page.) The technology had been under development since 1934. (And yes, fax technology was around that long ago; in fact, the first fax patent was issued in France in 1843.)
