More from Lean Dean

This is something I found from the East Bay Express from 2002. I don't think things have gotten better. I think he is continuing to purchase operations for the cash flow so he can continue making payments.
News & Notes
If he won a $1 billion jackpot, William Dean Singleton would have enough left for 87 working sculpture fountains.
From staff reports
Published: May 29, 2002

Give a guy some credit: Smells like trouble over at ANG Newspapers, which publishes the Oakland Tribune, Hayward Daily Review, and several other East Bay suburban dailies. According to a report in the Rocky Mountain News, credit-ratings outfit Moody's Investors Service has dealt a blow to ANG's parent company, MediaNews Group, which all told owns nearly fifty daily papers and eighty weeklies. Moody's has downgraded the company's credit rating to "junk" status. The reason? Try $976.4 million in long-term debt. The company now has a debt-to-equity ratio of 41 to 1, which means majority owner William Dean Singleton would have to liquidate all of his company's assets 41 times over to get it out of the red.Over the last fifteen years, Singleton has borrowed nearly $1 billion as he built a newspaper empire stretching across the country. He honed a formula of buying up struggling small-town newspapers for a song, stripping operations to the bone, cutting overheads as much as possible, and waiting for the ledger to roll into the black. But such leveraging is always risky, and if profits drop even incrementally -- say, um, during a brief recession -- the debt payments can become a massive burden. MediaNews' net income slipped to a mere $2.75 million last quarter, an eighty percent drop from six months earlier.

 

Might explain why he went in together with Hearst on San Jose and St. Paul.

 

But you know what they say if I owe you $1,000 its my problem. If I owe you $1 million, it's your problem.

 

This from a CJR article:

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Dean Singleton's extraordinary business savvy has made him a full-fledged member of the American elite. He earns more than a two-million dollars a year; he cavorts with presidents and senators; he is a leading member of Denver society. His primary residence, where he lives with his wife, Adrienne, and three children, is a stunning mansion in Denver's wealthiest neighborhood, a mansion that contains eleven bathrooms and an elevator, since he has difficulty climbing stairs. Singleton also owns four cattle ranches in Colorado, along with a home on Cape Cod where, during the summer months, he goes sailing with the musician James Taylor.

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Makes you feel good when you're re-interviewing for you own job?
I think it to be naive to think he and his company are not making money on your backs.

 

And meanwhile, back at his Bay Area satellite papers, reporters are "living" (if you call it that) on $25,000 a year. This, before his latest entree into cornering the Bay Area print market.

Meanwhile, I just hung up the phone with a very discouraged employee at one of his SoCal papers. Normally upbeat, this person sounded like they had just been hit with a 2-by-4.

I'm not rooting for cancer. Bad, bad karma. Financial ruination would work just fine.

 

1) Singleton has "business savvy." I never knew slashing and burning to be confused with "savvy."

2) James Taylor needs to pick better friends. Let Singleton listen to "You've Got A Friend" as much as he wants. Doesn't mean Taylor has to be his.

 

I like JT a lot less now. I think Singleton's favorite song is "Steamroller Blues." The guy is brilliant though. Pay yourself $2 mill a year while the company is swimming in debt. He's not personally responsible for it though. When he's done with the company, he'll be able to retire and walk away and leave the mess to somebody else.

 

I wanna . .

STOP!

Thank you, Deany.

I wanna . . .

STOP!

Thank you, Deany.

How Sweet It Is to be a worker screwed over by you.

It's like jelly, baby.

 

Circa April 1995: William Dean Singleton sells The Houston Post, a one-time family-owned paper by the Hobbys, to The Hearst Corporation as The Houston Chronicle becomes the one major paper in Houston, Texas. Amazing. Nowadays, some people (not a lot of us current and former newspaper people, just others who apparently are "in the know") are looking at Singleton like he's a fucking genius. Incredible. AP, etc. He's a brain. Yeah ... but he's no Bobby "The Brain" Heenan, that's for sure.

 

Looks like MORE consolidation coming from Lean.

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2007/08/shrinking_pt.php

Rumors circulating in the L.A. Newspaper Group newsrooms talk of the papers and their staffs eventually being mashed into one universal operation with cookie-cutter front pages and, for journalists at the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

 

It makes me sick when millionaires (BILLIONAIRES!) cry poor. All we hear about is how much money is wasted on reporting, publishing and production. No doubt ad revenues are down, but I find it hard to believe Lean Dean is losing money. He's just not making as much as he previoulsy did and probably never will again.
It's why I find it hard to sympathize with baseball owners who cry poor. It's not that they are losing money year after year, it's that they aren't making as much money from one year to the next. Most of them anyway.
I'm all for making as much money as you can, but how greedy can you be? Looks like those of us working at LANG are going to find out.