Results tagged “medianews” from Ron Kaye L.A.

The end is near for the Daily News and several other newspapers in the LA market owned by Denver's Dean Singleton, the Denver media mogul whose holding company is filing for bankruptcy.

Many papers in the MediaNews chain ran a company press release that buried the bankruptcy, saying Singleton's holding company, Affiliated Media, had cut a deal with creditors holding nearly $1 billion in virtually worthless paper.

The deal will leave Singleton and his management still in charge but in control of only 20 percent of the stock. That will reduce the burden of debt to just $165 million, according to the Wall St. Journal, which the company's value at $200 million and noted it is the seventh newspaper company to file for bankrupty, including the LA Times and Orange County Register.

The WSJ reported what the MediaNews announcement did not: What Singleton plans to do now.

"Singleton said he wanted to try to be the aggressor in merging newspapers...cleaning up the company's debt load allows him to help lead newspaper-industry consolidation," the WSJ reported.

"People in the industry have pointed to MediaNews's paper in St. Paul and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis as potential candidates for a combination, as well as to adjacent papers in Southern California published by MediaNews, Tribune Co. and Freedom Communications Inc. There are potential regulatory hurdles to some newspaper combinations."

When asked which newspapers might be combined, Mr. Singleton answered: "You can look at the map."

If you look at the LA map you will see Singleton owns the South Bay Breeze, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Whittier Daily News, Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Inland Valley Bulletin and San Bernardino Sun.

In the past 10 years, Singleton has tried to consolidate many operations of those papers, then backed off and tried various other strategies without success, hit hard by the decline of newspapers and more recently the recession.

The Hearst Corp. has been his principal benefactor over those years, buying the Daily News offices and other property from MediaNews and partnering in some newspapers. The WSJ, in reporting details about the bankruptcy, said Hearst had a $400 million stake.

What the implications of the deal and Singleton's "merger" and consolidation" comments is this: There just isn't enough money in newspapers to allow for competition, even the pretense of competition.

Hearst and MediaNews own almost all the newspapers in the Bay Area, for instance, from San Francisco to San Jose, Contra Costa and Oakland -- all of them crippled by debt and falling revenue.

The entire LA market is owned by MediaNews and Tribune Co., throw in the bankrupt Register and you have Orange County with options on San Bernardino and possibly Riverside County.

It's noteworthy that the San Diego Union-Tribune ,bought last year cheaply without heavy debt, is believed to have become profitable again after staff cuts and scaling spending to revenue..

That is the point. One paper without competition can thrive for a good many years even in the face of the Internet and the lack of younger readers. Two or more cannot.

So look for deals quickly.

It's not a coincidence that the Times just took over printing the Wall St. Journal and others papers, forcing it to move to early deadlines as the Daily News did several years ago.

The predicate of the deals are already in place and you can be sure a lot of negotiations have been going on behind the scenes for a long time.

The only obstacle to the Times taking over the whole LA market and potentially salvaging the existing papers nameplates in localized editions is the U.S. Justice Department and laws against monopolies.

As someone who worked in corporate journalism for four decades and bristled against its homogenizing of the news, you can take my word for it that there hasn't been much competitive journalism in newspapers for most of those years.

The corporate rules of journalism sucked the life out of newspapering, eliminating the kind of robust wars when there 12 newspapers in New York, eight in LA, six in Chicago with multiple owners and very different points of view.

One monopoly newspaper in major cities is sustainable and should have been done several years ago before staffs were gutted, talent and skill lost and the value to readers diminished.

Many will lament the loss of competition but competition has been an illusion for years and there should only be a brief mourning period for newspapers that lived a long and prosperous life and died of old age.

One healthy mainstream corporate newspaper can do things we will never be able to achieve on the Internet.

Most of all, they can provide a singular place for a shared experience available to everyone for an overview of who and what we are, an overview sanitized by the so-called objectivity they provide.

And they will have the resources to send teams of reporters out on the big stories like earthquakes and catastrophes of one sort or another and to develop staff with highly specialized skills and experience in specific areas.

The real question is whether they will provide an over-arching vision that will bring vast and complex metropolitan areas together.

For our city, that has always been the problem. The Times has failed to offer a vision of greater LA that is inclusive and reflective of the incredible complexity of the region, geographically, ethnically, demographically and all the social, cultural and political ways we differentiate ourselves.

That is where the value to readers and advertisers is -- and where the money is for publishers.

This is not the end of your daily newspaper. It's just the beginning of the end for hundreds of newspapers and the collapsing of many others into single regional franchises that can survive as the only source of printed news and advertising on a daily basis.

One paper. One staff. One press. One distribution system. One voice.

In Los Angeles, the Times will be that voice.

If the Daily News or other daily papers remain in the L.A. metropolitan market, they will do so in name only as intensely localized sections of the Times. Consolidation will occur quickly through sales, partnerships or closures.

I don't think there's any other way. And it's become clear in recent days that the people who run the nation's major newspaper corporations have come to the same conclusion after months of secret meetings that undoubtedly violated anti-trust laws.

But who cares about the legal niceties? The cost of producing and distributing a daily newspaper is too high and the revenue too low to sustain even minimal competition. Not enough people, especially younger people, read a newspaper regularly. Not enough advertisers still need to sell their products through a newspaper.

Most will say the Internet has won the war. But it would be truer to say that the newspaper industry has lost the war. Newspapers are boring and irrelevant to the lives of most people, too much of what they print as news is already old by the time it's delivered.

The editors and publishers who run newspapers responded too slowly and with too little imagination to the online revolution.

The same thing happened when television arrived in every house in the 1950s. Suddenly, people could see events live in their home as they happened and the words and still images in newspapers couldn't compete with the film footage and live video on television.

The result was that half the newspapers died. Major cities went from four, eight, 12 newspapers to one to two. .

Corporations took over took over from individual owners who published papers that let them give life to their point of view and values as they fought ferociously for readers in an anything-goes war.

There were outrageous tabloids and profoundly serious ones and everything in between. They were heirs to what started out as the free-wheeling penny press that gave birth to the First Amendment. In Philadelphia alone Ben Franklin and 120 others who owned presses told the world what they knew and what they believed. They slandered and muckraked and sparked lively public debates.

For the last 50 years, the voices of those who could tell the stories that move minds and hearts have been thwarted by the new rules of corporate journalism that demanded a kind of pseudo-objectivity and awarded great prizes and high salaries to those who conformed the best.

The result was profit margins of 20, 30, 40 percent on spectacular revenues  A lot of people got rich, even a lot of journalists got well-to-do.

Those days are over.

The Tribune Company, owner of the LA Times, Chicago Tribune and many other major newspapers and TV stations is preparing to file for bankruptcy. It's not broke, it just can't pay its bills in part because of the global economic crisis, in greater part because its revenue are falling far faster than it can cut costs.

The problems of Tribune are the problems of the industry.

For much of this year, most of the major newspaper corporations have been meeting in secret to figure out how to survive -- without really changing. The strategy involves consolidations through partnerships and transfer of ownership and closures that will give total dominance over major metropolitan entities to single newspaper operations.

In recent months, the strategy has been unfolding with more than two dozen major papers being put up for sale only to find out they were worth no more than the value of their assets: Buildings, land, the distribution system, the bottom line value to advertisers of those, mostly older, customers still addicted to holding a newspaper in their hands.

The presses themselves were worth no more than what Third World countries were willing to pay for them.

Then, last week, the Rocky Mountain News announced it probably would not be able to find a buyer and would likely stop printing after many months of losses -- a move that would leave its joint operating agreement partner, MediaNews' Denver Post, with a total monopoly.

The Miami Herald sent up a similar smoke signal Friday and then Sunday, it was Tribune hiring bankruptcy advisers and ready to seek protections that will let it sell off assets, restructure contracts and other liabilities, cut whatever kinds of deals that will allow it to survive.

Many of those deals are probably already negotiated, at least in principle.

Like the auto industry, the newspaper industry is out of touch with what people want and its cost structure is out of whack with the value of what it produces.

Newspapers don't need the federal government to bail it out of its failure. It just needs the federal government to look the other way as the last vestiges of competition are eliminated.

So be it.

Pasteurized and homogenized news and information is all the press is capable of anymore. 

The free expression of ideas envisioned in the Bill of Rights is alive and well on the Internet. Anybody can say what they want and stand a chance of being heard. Businesses based on news, information and opinion are starting to flourish online with vastly different cost and revenue models. 

The exercise of First Amendment rights has never been stronger. It's just that free speech isn't what newspapers sell. They might just as well be licensed and regulated by government if it made any difference. But it doesn't

No, this is not the end of newspapers. It's the end of competitive newspapers. The survivors will keep shrinking until their revenue surpasses their costs. Their importance in our lives will shrink along with the changes as the public increasingly turns to the Internet where everyone can be a provider of news, information and ideas and well as their consumer.

The democratization of news is a good thing, and will become a great thing in the next few years.

I can only speak for myself and have been here on my blog for the last seven months since I was fired by the Daily News for standing in the way of its decline and fall. \

Needless to say, the money isn't the same. But there's joy in finding my own voice after 44 years of bumping up against corporate journalism's stifling constraints on free expression.

I'm an activist now, not a journalist. But my belief in the power of the truth to change the world is as strong today as it was when I started out in newspapers. The truth isn't a commodity that someone can own. It's what endures over time when the voices of many are engaged in a and open public conversation.

Newspapers are just a part of that conversation, a much smaller part. And that's a good thing. Much of what's wrong with America, with our city, is due to the lack of the kind of public conversation that the Internet makes possible.

Let the conversation begin.