Letter from Dean Singleton about the State of Newspapers

This is a portion of a letter that was sent to MediaNews employees about the future of journalism and newspapers.

We will continue to expand our newspaper websites far beyond the traditional core. MediaNews newspapers have aggressively embraced an “online first” approach, which has resulted in major changes in newsroom cultures and how they operate -- and resulted in substantial increases in our Web site traffic for breaking news, local photos and other content. We have been, are and will continue to be the primary provider of local news and information in our marketplaces. Our newspapers are listening to what readers want, and we would expect there to be a continued extension of content, particularly online, as well as continued expansion of video, rich databases of local information and other content that is first and foremost useful to our audiences.

Our company can’t win the online battle alone. That’s why we’re investing with other newspaper companies to acquire creative online vendors that can help facilitate industry products to leverage our local strengths across national platforms. Stay tuned for announcements to come.

We have insisted that our newspapers embrace the Newspaper Next approach to seeking out “jobs to be done” which really means being on the lookout for unmet customer needs—and to unleash new products to satisfy those needs, to build audiences and to create marketplaces.

So, while we are innovating and expanding our core newspaper websites, we are building or expanding new sites such as LA.com, BayArea.com and InsideDenver.com as hubs not only for our newspaper site content, but also as a focal point for our marketplace concept. Our marketplace strategy will emphasize leveraging the interactivity of the web, with user generated content, customer feedback, and user self-generated ads. We anticipate introducing several marketplaces on our regional hub sites by late this year or early next year. While we have historically been a mass medium both in print and online, the marketplace approach is about niches—aggregating audiences with common interests, but going local and deep as opposed to broad and shallow.