Times Mirror, MediaNews Group Form Ad Alliance

Times Mirror Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times, said Thursday it formed an advertising alliance with MediaNews Group’s Los Angeles-area newspapers and made a minority investment in the MediaNews affiliate that oversees those and other papers.

Closely held MediaNews and its affiliate, Garden State Newspapers Inc., are run by William Dean Singleton of Denver. He and Times Mirror declined to specify the terms or amount of the investment.

Singleton has been aggressively building a newspaper chain in Southern California and recently bought the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Daily News in Woodland Hills. His companies also own the Pasadena Star-News, Whittier Daily News and San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

Times Mirror spokeswoman Martha Goldstein said that while The Times would continue competing aggressively against those papers, “Singleton asked us to invest in Garden State Newspapers and we agreed” because it would help “create an environment for evaluating other opportunities.”

Under the pact, advertisers will be able to buy pre-printed inserts to run in The Times and the Wednesday editions of Singleton’s Los Angeles-area newspapers. Households that don’t subscribe to any of the papers will receive the inserts by mail.

The program, called Times Direct, will continue to be marketed by The Times, while Singleton’s company will receive a fee from The Times for handling the additional distribution of the inserts, said Robert Brisco, The Times’ senior vice president of advertising and marketing, and new business development.

The alliance “creates a more efficient way of reaching large numbers of newspaper subscribers,” Brisco said.

As of March 31, the weekday circulation of The Times was 1.1 million, and the circulations of Singleton’s Los Angeles-area newspapers totaled 422,585, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Overall, MediaNews publishes 36 daily and 96 non-daily newspapers, including the Oakland Tribune and Denver Post. Times Mirror also publishes several other newspapers, including Newsday in New York and Baltimore Sun.