Dean Singleton: Dawn Breaks Over Marblehead

Dean Singleton, the news aggregator who bought up dozens of once-great newspapers in the fin-de-siecle of their existence, wrote a memo to his editors on May 8. He just figured out that the web is important, too, but he has decided that giving away news articles online devalues his dead-tree newspapers. This may sound sarcastic and hyperbolic, but it is no more than the truth.

...we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free. Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business - the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis.

Judging by the San Jose Mercury News, it is a stretch to call it "great local journalism" these days. Singleton says it's time to end the free ride, time to tell

our online audience (who don’t buy the print edition), that if you want access to all online content, you are going to have to register, and/or pay. If a non-subscriber wants the newspaper content in its entirety online, they will be directed to some sort of registration or pay vehicle (and if they are a print subscriber, they will have full access at no charge). To be clear, the brand value proposition to the consumer is that the newspaper is a product, whether in print or online, which must be paid for.

Singleton clearly thinks, in the Internet age, that the best way to disseminate news or communicate with an audience is to print the message on paper and place it on doorsteps. Wow.

To reach a younger audience, he proposes a new kind of regional news web site that will include some user-generated news and be "actively managed" to present breaking news. The key will be to differentiate from the existing newspaper.com kind of site and not just present printed newspaper content. He calls the new vision "news.com."

The most interesting proposal is a local site:

We will build a new local utility site (Local.com), which is an ecosystem of local information, resources, user content, shopping guides, and marketplaces. This site will be focused on a younger audience as well as other targeted audiences based on demographics which are attractive to our current and potential advertisers. We have the advantage of being the trusted source of for news and information in our communities and have a large base of traffic to feed into Local.com.

Local.com will leverage existing newspaper content and existing traffic, and we will add new content (such as Entertainment/Lifestyle) to target a younger audience. Central to this local site will be an aggregation of city or community sites (in the YourHub model) and marketplaces.

Local.com will be the ultimate site for people to find stuff, do stuff, and get stuff done in their local market.

This sounds okay, except that we've had the YourHub model off the San Jose Mercury News website for two years now, and it stinks. Go to the mothership web site, click on "Your City" and find the name of your city in the list. Then upload your photos and comment in the forums. Go on. What are you waiting for? You don't find this compelling in the slightest? Well, what's wrong with you?

Thanks to fellow blogger and former newspaperman Gary Scott for posting the entire memo.