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The Skinny on Media News/ Bay Area News Group |
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The Skinny on Media News/ Bay Area News Group |
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The original note:
Recently—over the past several weeks—articles have started appearing under the name Media News in a number of Bay Area papers: the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, and the papers comprising the Argus Newspaper Group (ANG), chief among them the Oakland Tribune. The ANG papers are hosted at InsideBayArea.com.
What's happening is that the work of various writers—and especially, Raiders beat writers Steve Corkran of the Times and the ANG's Jerry McDonald and Bill Soliday—is being shared collectively across papers. When one of these writers' columns appears in his own paper it runs under his byline and the title Staff Writer; if appearing in a different paper, the writer's byline is followed by Media News or Media News.
Because the same article may be used on three different web sites on a given day, and appear with three different titles, it becomes difficult (and time-consuming) for us to unerringly spot and weed out duplicates. We do try to do so, but if unsure, the policy is to include both articles and let the reader decide. 
The latest permutation:
As of about the end of October, 2007, what had been called Media News is now using the name Bay Area News Group. It appears to be the same principal core of papers as made up the Media News group, although we notice that the Santa Rosa Press Democrat now occasionally runs Steve Corkran and/or Bill Soliday pieces in addition to the other papers.
After doing some investigation, Media News turns out to be far more than a cooperative venture between small Bay Area papers struggling to survive, as we had naively assumed. We knew that last year both the Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News were said to be on the block, up for sale. The Murky News basically did away with its dedicated Raiders beat writer and began using instead the articles of Steve Corkran, the long-time beat writer for the Times. Corkran's daily columns were supplemented with occasional pieces by the San Jose paper's own, less-than-inspiring group of columnists (Ann Killion, Tim Kawakami, Mark Purdy, Daniel Brown).
(For those of you Raiders fans who live afar, San Jose is part of Santa Clara County, which adjoins Alameda County, which includes the cities of Oakland and Alameda. So it was indicative of serious hard times that San Jose's leading paper couldn't employ a beat writer for the NFL franchise calling the next county over its home.)
What we didn't know, and have only recently learned, is that Media News is a conglomerate owned by Denver billionaire Dean Singleton, and bought the Times, Mercury News and the Monterey Herald over objections from smaller papers—among them, the fiercely independent biweekly San Francisco Bay Guardian—that the move would eliminate competition in the Bay Area. Prior to the purchase the three papers mentioned were part of the Knight-Ridder chain.
The Singleton acquisition was challenged in federal court on antitrust grounds, apparently, but U.S. District Judge Susan Ilston ruled in Singleton's favor. She found there would not be "irreparable harm" if the deal went forward.
Since the Argus Newspaper Group (ANG), which includes the Oakland Tribune and approximately six other small East Bay papers, now regularly carries Media News articles, presumably it too has been gobbled up by Singleton interests.
In our view all this is sad. We don't like monopolies and we enjoy being able to read differing points of view in different papers. We're seeing less and less of that in the print media as conglomerates—read: monopolies—strengthen their hold in major markets. San Francisco's one serious daily, The Chronicle, is now a Hearst paper—the family that gave the world yellow journalism. E-e-e-e-w-w-w!! We find that for serious news we're better off reading the New York Times online . . . Sad.
If you want to read more about Singleton's acquisitions—admittedly from a perspective of a harsh critic—check out "Bruce," the blog of Bruce B. Brugmann, Bay Guardian publisher. Do a search for "Media News" within his blog and you'll come up with a number of posts beginning last July.
Here is a list, as of Friday, July 13, 2007, of the Media News holdings ("partners") in Northern California. It's clearly not complete, since it omits the Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, and Monterey County Herald, among other papers.Media News Group Corporate Sitemap
Last updated Sunday, November 11, 2007
