Dean Singleton is stepping down as CEO of MediaNews Group (which owns that big Denver newspaper, among others), though he'll remain as Chairman as well as publisher of the Denver paper. In a Westword interview, he discussed the move along with online media:
"We're experimenting with pay walls, but there's no certainty pay walls are going to work," he concedes. "The best reason to have a pay wall is that it sends a message to consumers that all information is not free. And I think having sent the message for fifteen years that it is, we need to send a different message -- that all information isn't free. [Pols emphasis] Although you can't have a total pay wall, because we're generating a lot of traffic, and a lot of revenue, for the content we have.
We discussed this issue last summer after we received a "cease and desist" letter from the friendly folks at MediaNews Group and others. It's incredible to see Singleton make this statement because it's so...so...illogical.
Newspapers and other traditional media outlets have been "giving away" their content for free for decades, and now they want to try to re-train their audience to pay for it? Singleton says "there's no certainty pay walls are going to work." We'll go a step further -- there's no way that pay walls are going to work for exactly the reason Singleton says above. The only possible way that this could work, as we've said before, was if every single news outlet in the country decided to go behind a pay wall; it can't work otherwise, because there's so many different places for people to go for their news that they don't need to pay for it.
Singleton seems (sort-of) to understand that a pay-wall idea is futile, even as he talks about trying to push it through:
"The opportunity in new media is not really different than print was for the last hundred years. [Pols emphasis] We talk about selling newspapers, but we never really got paid for content. We got paid for the paper and ink it was printed on, but we built large audiences and got paid by the advertisers who wanted to reach that audience. I don't think new media is going to be that much different, and I don't think we'll get a lot of money for that content. We never have and we probably never will. But the audience we're building will generate a lot of revenue, and the more focused and fine-tuned that audience is, the higher rate you can get for that audience. And we're learning to do that."
If you go behind a pay wall, you will dramatically reduce your online traffic, and thus your value to advertisers. You can't make significant money from content and significant money from advertisers at the same time, and that's not something that is unique to the Internet age. Twenty years ago, you couldn't sell a daily newspaper for $10 and also expect a huge audience that would be attractive for advertisers -- there's a reason that the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News were practically free in the early 1990s. So why would online news be any different? Singleton essentially discusses this above, yet is insistent on "trying" to do a pay-wall.
This probably won't work, but we're going to do it anyway isn't an idea we'd stand behind.
We wrote yesterday about the virtually unprecedented move by The Denver Post to run a front page editorial bashing Gov. Bill Ritter for signing an executive order on Friday allowing for a partnership agreement with state employees. As we said then, forget the issue for a moment: Running a front page editorial in a major metropolitan newspaper is indefensibly wrong.
As former Denver Post columnist Jim Spencer writes, it seems as though there aren't a lot of happy folks in the Post newsroom over this:
"The language used and the placement demonstrate a certain hysteria that stems from Mr. Singleton's personal dislike of organized labor," Ritter's spokesman, Evan Dreyer, said Sunday.
"I think the degree of the personal attacks is a bit surprising for a newspaper of this caliber. To stoop to this level is unbecoming."
Dreyer said the governor "extended the courtesy" of telling Singleton and Post Editorial Page Editor Dan Haley about the executive order the day before it was issued last Friday.
"It was apparent two minutes into the conversation that Mr. Singleton was not happy," Dreyer said.
Singleton did not return an emailed request for comment Sunday. In an email, Post Editor Greg Moore said, "I don't have anything to do with editorials." Moore declined to discuss the decision to put the editorial on the front page, which is almost always reserved for news.
In an interview Sunday, Haley said he wrote the editorial. He called the decision to do so "a collaborative decision between the publisher and myself." Singleton serves as the Post's publisher and apparently ordered the editorial placed on the front page [Pols emphasis]...
...A source inside the Post newsroom said that most staff members were not aware of the tenor of Sunday's editorial and only learned of its placement late Friday afternoon.
"I didn't have any conversations with anyone about it," said one staffer who asked to remain anonymous. "I heard Greg tell some people it was going on the front page. All I knew was Dean was pissed off. So pissed off that he put an editorial on the front page. Who does he think he is - Hearst?"
The language in the editorial was so raw that the staffer predicted some distress among people in the newsroom.
"You can be opposed to what the governor does," he said. "But this name-calling stuff is embarrassing."[Pols emphasis]
Spencer also notes that Singleton's hatred of unions is well-known and reflected in his past history of newspaper ownership.
Singleton's visceral reaction did not surprise journalism scholar John McManus.
McManus, an author and professor, runs a San Francisco-area media watchdog group called GradetheNews.org. McManus says Singleton's hatred of unions revealed itself in his handling of a series of newspapers he bought recently in the Bay Area.
"He established something called the Alameda News Group for the small papers he owned," McManus said. "ANG papers were unionized."
When Singleton purchased the much larger Contra Costa Times, McManus said, Singleton merged the non-unionized Times staff with the ANG to form the East Bay Area News Group.
"Then," McManus explained, Singleton "said, 'We now have more non-union than union employees. So we will no longer negotiate with the union because it doesn't represent a majority of workers."
So far, that tactic seems to have worked, McManus said.
