William Dean Singleton has been called many nasty things over the years: miserly, greedy, inhumane. But the cofounder, chief executive, and driving force behind the Denver-based MediaNews empire is serious about his faith. He displays the “Creed of a Christian” prominently in his office atop the building of his flagship paper, The Denver Post, and says he does his best to live by its dictates. Maybe that’s why on Good Friday 2001, while most of America had its nose to the grindstone, Singleton’s co-workers were busy recreating.
All but the boss. Stuck in town due to a legal squabble, Singleton couldn’t keep away from company headquarters. “I don’t have a hobby,” the married father of three explained. “I don’t play golf. I don’t take long vacations. I’m just all consumed with newspapers.”
So he spent that holiday in the empty MediaNews suite, disturbed by little more than a nettlesome reporter and the occasional phone call. At one point a Post columnist called because he’d lost his W-2 and needed another – a laughably trivial query for a captain of finance, but Singleton handled it without complaint. Moments later, the phone jangled again with bigger news. Singleton exchanged a few brief words with the caller before hanging up. “I just bought another paper,” he said.
He said it the way most people would talk about purchasing a three-pack of underwear, which said less about the acquisition – Ruidoso News, a New Mexico daily – than the world Singleton runs in. Although the media magnate likes to present himself as a regular guy, and described his then-upcoming fiftieth birthday party as just a little get-together with old friends, the details put things in perspective: He’d tried to book the Eagles, but they had a conflict, so he had to make do with Michael Martin Murphey, the Fifth Dimension, and the Four Tops.
Asked whether fifty held any special significance, Singleton said not really. But some of his remarks indicated otherwise. His rationale for forging a joint operating agreement between his beloved Denver Post and its archrival Rocky Mountain News suggested that Singleton was yearning for a little journalistic respect. “The Post today is a good newspaper, not a great newspaper,” he said. “I knew that I could never spend enough to make it great while the newspaper war was going on. And I didn’t want my kids to make it a great newspaper. I want to make it a great newspaper.
“I’m going to be fifty, and I do have some health issues,” he went on, referring to the multiple sclerosis with which he’s dealt for many years. “But I expect to live a long time, and I wanted to get on with my life.”
Such pronouncements couldn’t be further from the image painted by his many detractors, who accuse Singleton of, among other sins, favoring cut-rate journalism. In their view, he is largely culpable for the deaths of two major metropolitan dailies – the Dallas Times Herald and the Houston Post – and a decline in quality at many others in his portfolio. He’s concerned only with the bottom line, they say, and doesn’t care about the jobs he’s eliminated, the salaries he’s reduced, the benefits he’s sliced, or the lives he’s affected for the worse. They offer plenty of evidence to back up these claims.
“Newspapers are not a growth business,” Singleton said. “If all I was interested in was a return in capital, I’d sell the company and put my money somewhere else. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because we want to be here, and we do what we do because we want to do it. It has nothing to do with dollars and cents except that dollars and cents keep the engine running – and you’ve got to keep the engine running. I’ve told our folks many times: You can go down with the ship, but you still went down.”
Whether due to his growing empire, or the increased ruthlessness of the media industry as a whole, the man who just purchased The Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, and a bevy of smaller Bay Area papers has experienced a reputation upgrade in recent years. In 2000, Forbes called him “the notorious bad boy of cheapskate publishing” – a fairly standard description. But in April 2001, Editor & Publisher magazine named him publisher of the year in a respectful, even laudatory article. Cover boy Singleton stood with his arm around a cow, looking uncomfortable in Western duds that appeared fresh off the rack, when, in fact, he was reared on a Texas ranch.
One of five children – an older brother died in a car crash at 21 – Singleton was precocious and entrepreneurial from early on, his elder sister Pat recalled. He also loved newspapers, which he viewed as a link to the outside world. At fifteen, he applied to the Graham News and wound up as sports editor for the tiny Texas weekly. The lad loved his duties and happily worked himself to exhaustion – which is perhaps one reason he doesn’t view job conditions that others revile as anything to gripe about.
After finishing high school in 1969, he landed a job at the Wichita Falls Times Record News, which sent him driving around to far-flung small towns in search of news. This led to his first big story when a local congressman told a meeting of area Democrats in Quanah, Texas, that the oil depletion allowance, an important tax break for Texas drillers, was about to be axed. “That got picked up nationally,” Singleton said, still savoring the scoop.
Singleton progressed to other writing and editing stints. Then in 1972, before he turned 21, a couple of Graham businesspeople came to him with a proposal. They wanted Singleton to start a paper to compete with the Graham Leader, which the powers that were perceived as antigrowth. The young man secured a $10,000 loan for his share and launched the Clarendon Press, which “just kicked ass,” he said. “We put out a really good newspaper. I got a couple of kids out of college to help write news and covered real stories. The Leader was primarily an editorial page with a lot of chicken-dinner news, but we put out a real newspaper.”
With backing from one of his partners, he then bought the Azle (Texas) News, which also thrived. But Singleton had bigger dreams. In mid-1975, upon learning that the E.W. Scripps Company would close the much larger Fort Worth Press, he decided to buy it. Even Ed Estlow, then-president of Scripps, thought he was nuts. “I told him I didn’t think it was practical because the Fort Worth Star Telegram, the other paper there, had the market wrapped up pretty well,” allowed the longtime Denverite and unabashed Singleton fan. Although Singleton bought the Press for a rock-bottom $100,000, he said he rapidly blew through more than half a million dollars’ worth of loans without denting his rival’s armor. He closed the paper that same November, leaving behind angry reporters who claimed they hadn’t been paid for two weeks. Singleton sold his weeklies to help settle the balance, and by his reckoning came within $300,000 of doing so. “There were no personal guarantees on that money, but I grew up in the ranch world, where if you owed somebody money, you paid them,” he said.
The fiasco taught Singleton a life lesson: “You’ve got to have a business plan up front, and know exactly what you want to do. … My motto from that point on was: ‘More cash in than cash out.'”
He regained his footing by helping a Boston company unload a chain of suburban weeklies. From there he went on a roll, reviving a small Massachusetts daily, scooping up three small New Jersey papers, and securing the presidency of DC’s Washington Star, circulation 250,000. Not bad for a 27-year-old.
Ultimately Singleton teamed with Richard Scudder, a member of a venerable New Jersey newspaper family who would become his fifty-fifty partner in MediaNews. In 1983, they purchased the Gloucester County Times, followed by two other nearby New Jersey papers, to form what’s known in the news business as a cluster. This is Singleton’s claim to fame: Although he didn’t invent the concept, he certainly perfected it. Clustering lets the owner of several papers cut costs by consolidating printing, composing, distribution, and even reporting operations. As an added bonus, circulations can be combined and sold to advertisers at a higher rate. Within a few years, the partners owned clusters in the East Bay and Ohio, which gave Singleton the financial clout to pursue bigger fish. He used it in 1986, when the Times Mirror Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times, was looking to unload the Dallas Times Herald. “We mortgaged ourselves to buy it,” Singleton conceded. He also asked after another Times Mirror paper, the Denver Post. “They said, ‘We’ll never sell the Denver Post,'” he recalled. “They said, ‘We can win in Denver, and we can’t win in Dallas; it’s destined to be number two forever.'”
The execs were right about Dallas, but that didn’t stop Singleton when the similarly challenged Houston Post went on the block. He was deep into negotiations for Houston when then-Times Mirror president Bob Erburu let Singleton know he’d changed his tune on Denver. Poring over the numbers, Singleton was torn. “I really wanted to buy the Denver Post, and I really wanted to buy the Houston Post, but I couldn’t afford to buy both of them,” he recalled.
He paused for effect, then continued: “So I bought both of them.”
Denver was a Singleton coup: Times Mirror, which wanted out badly, sold for $95 million, roughly what it had paid seven years earlier, and threw in new printing facilities worth $77 million. In a detail that leaves Singleton’s admirers awestruck, he even convinced the seller to essentially loan him $70 million to finance the purchase.
He demonstrated further business smarts in returning the Post to profitability. Singleton renewed the emphasis on coverage of metro Denver, cut costs by converting to direct billing, and paid attention to details Times Mirror had overlooked. “All the newspaper racks were on the wrong side of the street for the bus routes!” he recalled. But if he worked miracles in Denver, Singleton faltered in Dallas – he sold the Times Herald to publisher John Buzzetta for $110 million in 1988, two years after buying it for the same price. Following a desperate bid to stay afloat, Buzzetta sold the paper’s assets three years later to the owner of the rival Dallas Morning News, which shut it down. Singleton accepts no blame for the demise. “When I sold Dallas, there was no reason for it to disappear,” he said. “They had good, positive cash flow, but they didn’t have enough to cover the debt.”
Even so, many onetime Times Herald staffers look back on Singleton’s tenure in anger. “I don’t think Dean ever gave a shit about whether the journalism was good or bad,” said David Pasztor, a Times Herald veteran who now works for the Austin American-Statesman. “All he cared about was money.”
Similar vitriol flowed from ex-employees of the Houston Post, which Singleton sold to the Hearst Corporation in 1995. Hearst, which owns the rival Houston Chronicle, promptly shuttered the Post. Yet Singleton is well liked in Denver. Even the Post’s union reps said he has played it straight with them. Early on, the unions agreed to roll back a salary increase won near the end of the Times Mirror regime, and they allowed a wage freeze, because, Singleton believes, “we let them look at the books to show them that we were telling the truth about our situation.”
The entity that oversees the joint operating agreement between the Post and the Rocky also negotiated new union contracts with ease. But Linda Foley, president of the DC-based Newspaper Guild, warned against assuming that Singleton was equally magnanimous in other markets. “You have to remember that he needed the unions’ support to make sure the JOA was approved,” she said. “He needed something we could give him – but that’s not always true.”
A case in point is Singleton’s East Bay cluster, ANG Newspapers. In 1998, after years of haggling, ANG ratified a union contract that Erin Poh, a local rep for the Northern California Media Workers Guild, described as inadequate in nearly every respect. “There’s a base minimum of $500 a week, and with the cost of living the way it is in the Bay Area, that’s barely a living wage,” Poh said in 2001. “We have adults who have to live with roommates to make ends meet – and there’s no way to sustain a family on the wages ANG is paying.”
The guild renegotiated its contract in 2004, but Singleton still played hardball, and in the end agreed only to 3 percent annual raises for an already underpaid staff. “They’ve told us in bargaining that they consider ANG to be a training ground,” Poh said. “People come here for six months, they get their clips, and move on. And we object to that.”
The Oakland Tribune may be the Singleton property that most clearly divides his supporters from his opponents. The former argue that the paper wouldn’t exist if not for Singleton; the latter counter that he used draconian methods, and has since produced a paper that has little in common with its readers.
The Tribune‘s most prominent era occurred under publisher Joseph Russell Knowland, who starting in 1915 transformed it into a national power base of the Republican Party. But when Knowland left in 1966, the Trib‘s influence began to wane. “Oakland was the city of the Black Panther Party,” said Pearl Stewart, who wrote for the Tribune from 1976 to 1980, and served as its editor from late 1992 through late 1993. “But the paper remained very conservative. Black people weren’t even looked upon as sources for many news stories. So there was a lot of skepticism about the paper from the black community.”
The Knowland family sold to an interim owner in the late ’70s. From there, it went to Gannett, which eventually sold to then-publisher Bob Maynard, making him the first African American to own a mainstream metropolitan daily. The late Maynard put out an impressive product by most accounts, but couldn’t make things work financially. So Singleton, whose ANG properties ringed Oakland, bought the Trib in 1992. Before long, its staff had been carved from more than 600 to just over 250.
Singleton bridles at news reports that he’d canned nearly four hundred Tribune staffers. MediaNews, he clarified, purchased only the Tribune‘s assets. “We didn’t need their composing people,” he said. “We didn’t need drivers, because we already had a distribution system, and we didn’t need their carriers or their district managers, either. And we didn’t need double coverage on sports teams we already covered or county government that we already covered. So they fired everyone, and we hired the people we needed.”
While this helped stem the red ink, it arguably damaged the editorial product – even now reporters gripe about covering beats too sweeping for one person, and about lacking time to do things right. National reporting aspirations? Don’t even bother. “Local’s key – key,” Singleton said. “With such quick communication and 24-hour news channels on cable, the only thing we have to sell is what we produce – and the only thing we have that nobody else can produce is local news, local content, local sports, local information, no matter what it is.”
Singleton concedes that selling papers is job one, but that doesn’t mean he wants to be known as a guy who pulls journalistic punches to make a buck. Then again, even his beloved flagship isn’t immune when the bottom line is at stake. In recent years, Singleton beefed up the Post’s editorial staff in line with his “great paper” ambition, although he fell short of adding the one hundred new editorial positions he promised around the time of the JOA. But last month, after posting first-quarter earnings down $6.43 million from the same period in 2005, the Post announced it would cut 25 newsroom positions through attrition and buyouts.
Singleton’s far-flung employees nevertheless resent having to compete with Denver for resources. Sean Holstege, a former Tribune reporter and ANG union rep, cited a 2001 union analysis that found ANG was contributing 9 percent of the company’s total circulation and 18 percent of its revenues, while the Post contributed 29 percent of circulation but only 23 percent of revenues. “We’re the cash cow, and they’re the Pulitzer cow,” he said. “And that can be frustrating, because we feel we have the talent here to write Pulitzer Prize-winning stories all day and all night if we had the resources to do it right, but we don’t.” Holstege, who co-wrote the Tribune‘s award-winning coverage of the Bay Bridge welding scandal, recently left the paper for a better-paying job at the Arizona Republic.
Singleton acknowledges some disparities, attributing them to the balance sheets of individual papers. But the overall growth of his company has had much to do with the decline in stories depicting him as a penny-pinching, tight-assed newspaper vulture. In the old days, Singleton said, he could only afford papers that needed major surgery. Now he can pick up properties that are in considerably better shape – such as The Contra Costa Times and the San Jose Mercury News.
“I know not everyone has wonderful things to say about him,” said Ken Lowe, CEO of E.W. Scripps, which owns the Rocky Mountain News. “When someone pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps, as Dean has done, I’m sure they’ve bruised a few people along the way and had their share of skirmishes. But I think that’s just a process of growing up and maturing into the person he is today. He’s truly viewed as one of the leaders of newspapers today. He’s assuming the mantle, and I think he’s wearing it well.”
As for the future of MediaNews, Singleton eagerly awaits the day the Federal Communications Commission lifts its prohibition that keeps companies from operating newspapers and broadcast stations in the same media market. When that day comes – Singleton thinks it’s inevitable – he’ll launch a broadcast-buying binge. “To me it’s not just news coverage,” the financier explained as Good Friday ticked away. “It’s making something happen that will make the community a better place. The Denver Post played a major role in the Pepsi Center happening, a major role in getting the airport built, a major role in getting the new Mile High [stadium] built. And that’s what I want to do. I want us to be an advocate for things that are good, and I think most of our newspapers do that. And I like that. I want to do more than just sit on the sidelines covering meetings. I want to take an active role. I want to make a difference.”
Editor’s note:
This story was adapted from a lengthy 2001 profile that ran in our sister paper Westword.
