Media mogul builds modern empire

SUNDANCE — William Dean Singleton, the maverick chief executive of the MediaNews Group, had a special announcement for the editors of his 55 daily newspapers when they met in this rustic mountain resort early in May.

"We're buying Gannett," he deadpanned.

In the seconds before he acknowledged the joke, the editors fell silent. Singleton is just brash enough, and has been on just enough of a newspaper-buying spree, that making a move on the biggest newspaper company in the country was not entirely implausible. After all, he had been in the hunt for Knight Ridder's 32 dailies and wound up plunking down $1 billion for four of them.

"It wasn't that far-fetched," said Becky Bennett, editor of Public Opinion in Chambersburg, Pa. "He's pulled rabbits out of hats before."

Singleton, 54, a bantam figure with flinty blue eyes, is indeed thought of as something of a magician in the newspaper world — having transformed himself from the son of a ranch hand in a tiny town in Texas to a media baron who now controls a newspaper empire that sprawls from coast to coast. He has, in a manner of speaking, sawed many of his competitors in half, only to have them hop off the table and become his partners.

His company, the privately held MediaNews based in Denver, owns 55 dailies including The Salt Lake Tribune, the Denver Post, the Detroit News, the Daily News of Los Angeles and the Berkshire Eagle, plus more than 100 nondailies. With the addition of the Knight Ridder papers — the San Jose Mercury News, the Contra Costa Times and the Monterey County Herald, all in California, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press — MediaNews has become the nation's fourth-biggest newspaper company, up from seventh.

For his next trick, Singleton hopes to lead the industry into a prosperous future as it seeks its footing in an increasingly Web-based world. This may be his most daring act yet. The newspaper business is in the midst of transformation, and no one, including Singleton, really knows what it is transforming into or how long it may take.

The big challenge, he says, is figuring out how to make money from the Web, where most news is free and ads are cheap. "If we don't start getting paid for news, we can't continue to afford to produce it," he said.

Singleton wants to help steer the industry collectively toward a solution; no one paper, he says, can do it alone.