Dateline: Mumbai

[Media Survival] Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group and publisher of The Salt Lake Tribune is advocating American newspapers start outsourcing certain newsroom tasks overseas. He told a professional newspaper association this week many of his chain's California publications have already saved oodles of cash by outsourcing certain jobs such as copy editing to India.

Singleton, who has spent much of this decade buying up newspapers was already overleveraged--and that was before Wall Street went into the crapper.

Unions at MediaNews Group papers--most of them in California, where the notion of collective bargaining still exists, if barely--are of course none too happy with their boss.

Friends at the Tribune tell me each day brings more uncertainty about their future. They keep their heads down and do their jobs. They are doing all that is asked of them--blogging more, updating more stories all day, working longer hours for less pay. The thanks they get is likely to be a job shipped to Bangalore.

I'm sure comments on this post will simply tell me and others in my profession to suck it up--we're all vulnerable in this country to outsourcing and that newpapers are lumbering dinosaurs that should have faced that reality long ago.

Maybe. All I can hope is that in the depression bound to come our way soon, publishers will hang on to a few American jobs and put people to work ala the old Works Progress Administration model. Maybe a few Trib staffers could be kept on the payroll to push brooms around The Gateway editorial offices?

For more depressing news on editorial outsourcing, go here. (Holly Mullen)

Drama at the Trib: No "Easy Button"

[Nervous Media Moguls] Over the past five years, MediaNews Group owner and Salt Lake Tribune publisher Dean Singleton has snapped up newspapers like a brown trout leaping for a nymph hatch. Unfortunately, the economy is tanking in tandem with dramatic drops in daily newspaper readership.

So, the guy owns a chain of newspapers and a boatload of debt. And Singleton is nervous.

The following two-page memo (click images for full size) to MediaNews staffs around the country dated Aug. 8, recently found its way to the City Weekly newsroom. But no way is anyone in Denver pushing the panic button. Or the Easy Button. (Holly Mullen)

More Buyouts at Singelton's Newspapers

[Media Megalomania] Alternative weekly The San Francisco Bay Guardian reports regularly on the activities of Dean Singleton and his MediaNews Group, parent company of The Salt Lake Tribune. That's because MediaNews owns several newspapers in California and especially in the heavily unionized Bay Area--including The Contra Costa Times, The Oakland Tribune and The San Jose Mercury News.

Late last month, MediaNews offered buyouts to 1,100 employees across the Bay Area. Pressure is building from corporate managers for workers to take the offers or face certain layoffs. And keep reading, for a choice and sympathetic quote from Singleton urging employees to stop living in the past, dammit!

(That's Singleton, on the right in the photo. He's crooning with the Beach Boys' Al Jardine, at some publisher's confab in 2005.)

So far, no similar bad news of buyouts, job cuts or downsizing has reached the Tribune. But even if it had, you wouldn't read about it in agitpropist Connie Coyne's Reader Advocate column--where it's noted every week that the Trib is always trying really, really, really hard to be a good product. So readers, quit bitching about persistent typos. And get out to the ass-end of your driveway to pick up your paper. (Holly Mullen)

100's the Loneliest Number

[Media] Nathan Gonzalez, a cops and courts reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune, has resigned to take a reporting job with The Arizona Republic in Phoenix.

According to Tribune staff members who keep track of such comings and goings from the Gateway newsroom, Gonzalez is the 100th editorial department employee to hit the pavement since Trib editor Jay Shelledy resigned almost four years ago and moved on to oversee print, broadcast and online student media projects at Louisiana State University.

Trib staffers keep a running list of people who leave the paper, and enjoy tipping City Weekly when they add another name. One long-time staff writer told me over lunch recently that working at the newspaper for many people has just become another job. "I just go to work and do what I'm told," the staffer told me.

It's a whole new and streamlined Trib, owned by Dean Singleton's Denver-based MediaNews Group. People who move on from there are made to understand there are always replacements--typically part-timers or 30-something "interns" who don't merit insurance and other benefits or competitive salaries.

(Holly Mullen)

Salt Lake Tribune to Launch New Super Blog

[Media] In keeping with its constant battle for relevance and readership in this whiz-bang, on-line era, The Salt Lake Tribune will launch a whole new, uber-blog shortly after the first of the year.

Salt Blog has learned that longtime Tribune staff writer Glen Warchol will assume the new post. Warchol, 55, has been with the paper for 10 years and has covered the general assignment, military affairs, legislative and state government beats.

Here at City Weekly, we also appreciate that Warchol has done his time in the alternative newspaper trenches. In previous lives, he was an editor at the defunct Twin Cities Reader in Minnesota and at the Village Voice Media-owned Dallas Observer.

Warchol says he'll be responsible for posting constantly throughout the day, with peak production times coming between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m.--when newspaper Web sites receive their heaviest on-line traffic. In establishing this position, the Trib follows nearly every other major daily in the country. Most papers have set up full-time blogs to sort through and update news stories worldwide for local relevance and to link readers easily to other sites.

Currently, the Trib publishes several beat-specific blogs. Those will continue. Warchol's big bad blog will simply take readers to greater dimensions, and all day long. At least that's what publisher William Dean "Dinky" Singleton and Trib editor Nancy Conway hope. Conway is said to have embraced the super blog concept--going so far out on a limb that she'll support an "edgy" (daily newspapers love that word) voice and Warchol's editorial freedom to be snarky, maybe even kinda-sorta profane (in a family newspaper way).

Oh, and in City Weekly's time-honored obligation to full disclosure, Warchol is my ex-husband and cohort in many past journalistic pursuits.

The Trib hasn't decided on a name for the blog. But the acerbic Warchol tells me he has his own suggestion: "I want to call it 'King Rat.'" (Holly Mullen)