Dean Singleton is still digging for gold.
The CEO of MediaNews still believes that the newspaper business in California will turn around. And some of that belief is based on a view that things always work out in California.
"California has always been bigger than life, in the upturns and the downturns," Mr. Singleton said. "This thing will turn around."
According to the piece by Richard Perez-Pena in the New York Times, Dean Singleton, head of the MediaNews Group, thinks so in spite of evidence to the contrary. MediaNews owns an extensive network in the Bay Area (including the San Jose Mercury News) and one in Southern
California, with dozens of small suburban papers and larger ones
like The Oakland Tribune and The Los Angeles Daily News.
“I have no doubt that
The Mercury News’s revenue base will perform better when things turn
around than almost any newspaper in the country,” Singleton says.
Others
are not so sure. “The Bay Area has been the canary in the newspaper
coal mine, and that was recognized a long time ago by a lot of people,”
said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst at the firm Outsell. “The impact
of the Internet has been heavier here and earlier here than anywhere
else in the country.”
Perez-Pena goes into depth analyzing recent decimation of Mercury News staff and operations, including cuts in the newsroom, from a high of more than 400 people early in this decade, to below 150.
Read the full story here.
