January 20, 2011 11:26 PM UTC

Singleton Steps Down as MediaNews Group, Talks Internet Tubes

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• by: Colorado Pols

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.