Glory days

William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, parent company of the Pioneer Press, spoke to a conference sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America over the weekend. Lean Dean had some typically blunt words about the future of the newspaper industry. Howard Owens reported some of his comments:

“If you read Romenesko every day and you hear our people in newsrooms whine — they whine and whine and whine wishing for the old days to come back. Damn it, I wish the old days would come back, too, but wishing for it isn’t going to make it happen. You must be focused on the future.”

And: “When we had to make cuts at one of our larger papers somebody in one of our unions put out a letter that said, ‘Well, we won’t be able to put out the same newspaper we have over the past 30 years.’ I said, ‘Precisely. Our readers don’t wnat the same newspaper we’ve been putting out over the past 30 years.’”

(Cribbed, naturally, from Romenesko.)