[Our regular contributor Martin Langeveld spent 13 years as a publisher in MediaNews Group. That gives him an inside perspective on the company's bankruptcy filing, which he shares with us here. —Ed.]
In August 2006, as part of a deal that netted MediaNews Group the Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, and the St. Paul [...]

Continuing on a theme: I’ve been discussing the apparent disconnect between the quality of a news site’s design (as perceived and rated by professionals) and how much time people spend there; as well as the kinds of things that count more than design: reader engagement, interaction, community, personality — real life behind and around the [...]

Remember? Two months ago, Associated Press chairman Dean Singleton said his organization would take a firm stand against unlicensed use of its content and that of its members. “We are mad as hell,” he declared at the AP’s annual meeting in San Diego, “and we’re not going to take it any more.”
Singleton is a newspaper [...]

It’s happening. Yesterday we revealed Steve Brill’s latest moves toward charging readers of newspaper websites, and separately, Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Brian Tierney said he would erect an online pay wall by the end of the year. Those developments followed similar statements by executives of Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group, among other newspaper companies.
As these paid-content [...]

It’s kind of a softball interview, but Jody Hope Strogoff’s talk with Dean Singleton, Denver Post publisher and MediaNews Group CEO  (“Innerview” in the Colorado Statesman) is worth reading for Singleton’s surprisingly candid remarks toward the end about the Rocky Mountain News, his Multiple Sclerosis, and his home and family.  And this about MediaNews’s paid [...]

Yesterday’s meeting of top newspaper executives in Chicago, where they considered ways to charge for content online, has reignited the often-passionate discussion of whether news sites could generate subscription revenue from readers. Plenty has been written about the futility of erecting pay walls — much of which I agree with — but a few points [...]

There’s lots of chatter about MediaNews Group’s plan to charge for some content online. Details still TK, but this is important: MediaNews president Jody Lodovic doesn’t expect the pay wall to generate significant income.
Lodovic told Editor & Publisher’s Jennifer Saba, “The whole idea is to stop the erosion from print to online and encourage people [...]

Not very surprisingly, my former employer, MediaNews Group, is in workout.  Surprisingly, this could turn out to be an opportunity to craft a truly new kind of news enterprise.  Bear with me.
As reported first by the New York Times, later in the Wall Street Journal and in the Denver Business Journal, the country’s fourth-largest (by [...]

In an approach rather different from Microsoft’s vision of content delivery in the future, which I described yesterday, MediaNews Group has announced plans for I-News, a system that will print your own customized newspaper on your own printer:
The “individuated” stories selected by each reader are sent to a special printer being developed for MediaNews that [...]