Dean Singleton on the plight of the major metro

[UPDATE: Predictably, this was the wrong day to bring this up.]

I get the feeling people think of MediaNews* CEO (and AP chairman) Dean Singleton as some sort of billionaire boogeyman, the last guy in the world you’d want buying your news organization, but his take on why newspapers in major metro markets are failing is pretty interesting: with scant mention of the secular shift to online news reading consumption, he attributes some of their decline to the strength of smaller suburban papers with loyal readership and advertisers, especially in San Francisco and Boston.

I think it’s certainly more complicated than that, but he’s pointing out something that few pundits outside these markets perceive.

(via NiemanLab)

* Disclosure: I’ve worked for a newspaper or two that MediaNews owns.