Singleton's strategy.Now that McClatchy Co. has agreed to purchase Knight-Ridder, a partnership led by William Dean
William Dean (b. 1840-01-08, d. 1905-09-04) was the Chief Locomotive Engineer for the Great Western Railway from 1877, when he succeeded Joseph Armstrong. Singleton's NewsMedia Group has emerged as the front-runner to buy four newspapers from McClatchy. Three of those papers--San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times The Contra Costa Times is a daily newspaper based in Walnut Creek, California. The paper serves Contra Costa and eastern Alameda counties, in the eastern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. and Monterey County Herald--are in California. It sets up a familiar Singleton strategy, one he's executed in several U.S. markets. He tries to encircle en·cir·cle tr.v. en·cir·cled, en·cir·cling, en·cir·cles 1. To form a circle around; surround. See Synonyms at surround. 2. To move or go around completely; make a circuit of. major metro centers with a ring of smaller suburban papers. Then editorial, advertising sales and administration are consolidated regionally, thus cutting costs and achieving economies of scale. The technique has succeeded in the L.A. market, where Singleton owns the Long Beach Press-Telegram The Long Beach Press-Telegram is a major daily newspaper published in Long Beach, California. Tracing its history to 1897, it is currently published by the Los Angeles Newspaper Group. External links
With the new publications, Singleton will replicate the strategy in Northern California. The partnership already owns nine papers in the Bay area, including the Oakland Tribune and Hayward Daily Review. The new acquisitions wouldn't directly affect the L.A. market. But one expert on media consolidation worries it could be a prelude to a larger strategy, one that could potentially muffle independent voices. "Buying a chain of suburban newspapers doesn't really lessen the diversity of voices, given that they don't overlap anyway. It's more a move related to offering packages to advertisers," said Frederick Wasser, professor at Brooklyn College in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of . "My concern would be any breakdown in cross ownership rules." Singleton has publicly advocated removal of the FCC (1) (Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, www.fcc.gov) The U.S. government agency that regulates interstate and international communications including wire, cable, radio, TV and satellite. The FCC was created under the U.S. rules preventing the same company from owning a newspaper and television station in the same city. Wasser's biggest concerns center on how chain ownership of local papers, in combination with cross-ownership, could diminish the local-news focus in suburbia. |
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