• PaidContent.org, Tuesday, April 7, 2009 12 PM

PaidContent's Staci Kramer interviews mad-as-hell MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton about his company's new initiative to better control the use of news industry content online. In a nutshell, Singleton says that print isn't going away, advertising can no longer carry the industry's weight, and online pay models may be coming soon.

"I think our industry has been very timid about protecting our content, probably because we've done so well in the past few years that we didn't recognize that misappropriation is as serious an issue as it is," Singleton says. As we're now reexamining our business models, it's become clear that we must protect the rights of our content. "We perhaps have been timid about enforcing (those rights)," he said. "No more. We own the content but we've let those who spend very little, if any, get the most advantage from it." That said, Singleton offered no new business model ideas.

"What's becoming clear is that for many, many decades, advertising has supported our news mission and it's not supporting it today," he said, adding: "If we don't solve these issues, then survival is not assured." When asked what would happen to sites like PaidContent once MediaNews embarks on its new initiative of suing all and sundry for aggregating and linking to Associated Press content (which it owns), Singleton replied, "I'll leave that to the rules of engagement that we'll be developing."

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