Tribune to Aim at Upping Readership, New Owner Says

The way William Dean Singleton saw it, the Oakland Tribune had two choices: Sell its key assets to his Alameda Newspaper Group or fold.

“The Oakland Tribune was ready to fail, and it was in our market,” Singleton said in an interview Friday at the Hayward Daily Review, one of his group’s four other newspapers in Alameda County, east across the bay from San Francisco. “It made strategic sense to do this deal. We weren’t beating the door down to do it. . . . (But) there was nobody else who really wanted it.”

That was part of the harsh reality that drove Tribune Publisher Robert C. Maynard, the nation’s only black owner of a major metropolitan daily, to sell the 118-year-old newspaper that he has nursed through crisis after crisis since buying it from Gannett Co. in 1983.

As part of the deal announced Thursday, Alameda Newspaper Group purchased the rights to the Tribune name, copyrights, circulation, advertising accounts and library. It did not buy the landmark Tribune Tower, heavily damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, or the company’s aging presses.

At Maynard’s request, the price was not disclosed, but one prominent newspaper analyst put it in “the mid-teens.” Most of that, $9.5 million, will go to repay a loan from the Freedom Forum, a media foundation run by former Gannett Chairman Al Neuharth that rescued the Tribune from pending bankruptcy last year.

Singleton, a plump 41-year-old with thinning hair and a boyish face, is known in the newspaper industry as a brash deal maker who favors distress sales. Revenue of his privately owned parent company, MediaNews Group, based in Houston, was an estimated $450 million last year.

He uses borrowed money--much of it from partner Richard Scudder--to buy troubled papers, then chops costs, primarily through layoffs, a technique that has earned him a reputation as a morale-buster more concerned with cost than quality.

His papers include the Denver Post, the Houston Post and monopoly publications in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Known as Dean, Singleton lives in Houston but spends much of his time on the road. Friday afternoon, after a rushed sandwich at the Daily Review, he headed for Fairbanks for a meeting at a paper he purchased in February. His favorite method of weight control, he said, is an annual visit to the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica, where he drops 20 pounds.

One of five children of a poor oil-field roustabout, Singleton grew up in a shack with an outhouse in the small town of Graham, Tex. He got his first reporting job there at age 14. Obsessed with the business, he calls his 4-year-old daughter Paige I.

Despite the Tribune’s waning circulation and advertising revenue, the deal appears to be a good one for Alameda Newspaper Group, which now has a lock on all the dailies in Alameda County. Its other papers are in Fremont, Pleasanton and Alameda.

“He (Singleton) was reluctant to let it shut down,” said John Morton, a Washington-based media analyst with Lynch, Jones & Ryan, a brokerage firm. That event would have set off a mad scramble for the paper’s remaining readership and advertising dollars with such competitors as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Contra Costa County papers owned by Dean Lesher.

The acquisition, Morton added, “lowers (Singleton’s) cost base and increases his coverage of the market.”

To lure advertisers in Alameda County and southern Contra Costa County, Singleton has put together brochures showing that his papers’ total circulation of more than 214,000 tops the nearly 170,000 of all other newspapers combined. The figures are from Audit Bureau of Circulation reports for the 12 months ending September, 1991.

A key goal, Singleton said, will be to win back the affluent readers in the scenic hillside neighborhoods outside central Oakland, who have largely deserted the paper in recent years. (Its circulation has dropped to about 110,000 from a high of 250,000.)

“We think the Tribune has gone overboard in focusing on the center city,” he said. “A large focus of what we do . . . will be to win back the hills.”

Will that mean getting away from the hard-hitting coverage of Oakland’s problems, for which the Tribune has become known? “The editorial focus will likely be very much as it is today,” Singleton said. Maynard will continue to write a column for the paper, he noted.

Maynard will publish his last Tribune on Nov. 30, with Singleton’s group taking over the next day and publishing the paper at one of his group’s three plants near Oakland. All 630 Tribune employees will be laid off. Singleton said Alameda Newspaper Group plans to “start fresh and hire about 250 people.”

Sensitive about the layoffs, Singleton hastened to note: “ANG isn’t terminating anybody. Their economic fate happened to them, not to us. They were destined to close anyway.”