William Dean Singleton
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William Dean Singleton is founder, vice chairman and chief executive officer of MediaNews Group, the fourth-largest newspaper company in the United States in terms of circulation, with 53 daily papers totalling 2.7 million subscriptions daily and 3 million on Sunday. Additionally, he serves as publisher of a number of MediaNews' dailies, including the Denver Post, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Detroit News.
He began his newspaper career at the age of 15 as a part-time reporter in his hometown of Graham, Texas, and bought his first newspaper at age 21.
Singleton has built his newspaper company through the acquisition of newspapers frequently on the edge of closure. In some cases — the Fort Worth Press and the Houston Post come to mind — he has failed with the papers and had to close them. In other cases — the Denver Post, the Oakland Tribune — he has taken papers that had almost run their course and reinvigorated them.
Singleton was a pioneer in the art of "clustering" — developing groups of newspapers that centralized a variety of functions, including production, ad sales, business operations and, in some cases, editorial. The perfect example of this was the Alameda Newspaper Group in suburban San Francisco, where in the mid-1990s, a central newsroom in Pleasanton, Calif., did all the copy editing, layout and page makeup for five daily papers.
He was also a pioneer at developing pooled-asset partnerships. Among the first were papers in California, which included papers from Gannett Co. Inc., Stephens Media Group and MediaNews. Singleton's company contributed Los Angeles Daily News and the ANG operation, as well as other papers, while Stephens contributed papers such as the Vallejo Times Herald and the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin of Ontario. A year after forming the partnership, the duo allowed Gannett to enter, with its contributions including the San Bernardino Sun and the Marin Independent Journal.
MediaNews has entered into similar partnerships in Texas and Pennsylvania with Gannett and in Colorado with The E.W. Scripps Company.
Singleton vexed journalists throughout the late part of the 20th century, with the newsroom staff of the Fort Worth Press throwing beer cans at him in the 1970s and the former editor of the Trenton Times telling the Columbia Journalism Review in the 1980s that under Singleton's cutbacks, "The public has lost a watchdog and gained a bulletin board."
In the late 1990s, Singleton began shifting his view that rather than merely a cost center, the newsroom was also an asset. He lured Gregory Moore, the former assistant managing editor of the Boston Globe, to the Denver Post and together the two made the paper's journalism respectable.
Singleton's empire began rapid growth in the early part of the 21st Century, when he acquired in rapid succession daily newspapers in Salt Lake City, Detroit, St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Jose, California.
Singleton served on the board of the Newspaper Association of America from 1993 until 2004 and is the former board chairman. In July 2006, he was elected chairman of the board of directors of the Associated Press, scheduled to take office in May 2007. He has been on the AP's board since 1999.
He serves on several boards in Colorado, including The Helen G. Bonfils Foundation, The Denver Center for the Performing Arts and the Winter Park Recreational Association Board.
Singleton is also a member of the Board of Trustees for the University of Denver.
He is married to the former Adrienne Casale of Fairfield, N.J. They have three children, William, Paige, and Adam.
