All entries tagged: MediaNews Group
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 »
Could strategic bankruptcies be needed to transform newspapers?
Continuing on a theme: I’ve been discussing the apparent disconnect between the quality of a news site’s design (as perceived and rated by professionals) and how much time people spend there; as well as the kinds of things that count more than design: reader engagement, interaction, community, personality — real life behind and around the content.
In a comment on the second post, Phil Buckley, whose commentary I had quoted and linked to, asked: “If you were starting a news organization today, where would put your initial efforts?”
I like this, because it’s the key question that all news organizations should be asking themselves. If tackled correctly, it can be a transformative question, a way to self-disrupt the organization, a way to get through the wormhole of reinvention that newspapers are facing, and come out on the other side with a workable business model.
And indeed, forward-thinking news organizations are asking it. But in some news organizations (like Phil, I try to call them that instead of newspapers), the process of dealing with this question leads to an uncomfortable realization: the business model for news in the future is so radically different from today’s legacy newspaper business that there is no way to get from here to there without “a major restructuring event,” which is a euphemism for bankruptcy.
In other words, the viable business model they can glimpse — consisting, perhaps, of a weekend-only or twice-weekly printed byproduct of an online-first publishing operation — represents such a downsizing of the enterprise that it can’t possibly carry the company’s legacy debt load, so the only way to make the transition is first file Chapter 11.
Fair Syndication Consortium: News orgs’ new way to confront Google?
Remember? Two months ago, Associated Press chairman Dean Singleton said his organization would take a firm stand against unlicensed use of its content and that of its members. “We are mad as hell,” he declared at the AP’s annual meeting in San Diego, “and we’re not going to take it any more.”
Singleton is a newspaper man. His first reporting gig came as a teenager in Graham, Texas, and now he’s in charge of MediaNews Group, the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper company. So, of course, he knew that channeling Howard Beale was certain to find its way into every article and blog post about the speech. That’s why he said it, and that’s how most people learned of the AP’s supposed crackdown on piracy of its work. (Watch the meeting here, or listen to the magic words below.)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Here’s what followed: Google was said to be a major target of the speech, even though Singleton didn’t mention the company or even the phrase “search engine.” News aggregators were also assumed to be in the crosshairs, although The Huffington Post, like Google, is a paying customer of the AP. Everyone was very angry, and nuance seemed to be lost amid all the saber-rattling. Since then, the AP has done little to clarify whom, exactly, its mad at or how it plans to address that anger.
Shift the tale to New York, three weeks later, at the headquarters of Thomson Reuters, where a slew of major news organizations — but not the AP — gathered to consider a new tact in combatting online piracy. Reuters and Politico were already on board. So was every member of the Magazine Publishers Association.
They proposed banding together as the Fair Syndication Consortium with an innovative approach to combatting the true tapeworms of the online news business: not Google, certainly, or Arianna Huffington, but wholesale copiers of content. The consortium is targeted, in part, at spam blogs — or splogs — that reprint news articles and posts in their entirety alongside cheap advertising. Splogs are typically automated, and the only human being involved is the one who gets a check at the end of the month.
What the consortium seeks to do is turn tapeworms into fungus. They don’t want to shut down splogs and their ilk, which would be a largely sisyphean task of enormous cost. Instead, the consortium is negotiating with the networks that serve ads against pirated content to negotiate a substantial share of that revenue. Keep reading »
