MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton, whose company owns the Pioneer Press, sat down for a long Q&A with the Denver alt-weekly Westword. The interview touches on MNG's plans to charge for web content, create new sites and, in Singleton's role with AP, battle those who sell ads around other people's content.

In the piece, Singleton argues newspaper doomsayers (cough, cough) overrate the deepcession when forecasting a dire future, and that other media are suffering more right now than print. He might be right about the latter, but the former is wishful thinking, I think.

There's a pretty cogent explanation of MediaNews strategy to withhold newspaper content on the web:

Now, you can't just put the newspaper content on the web and expect everybody to pay for it. But what you can do is create some niche models that can be paid for. And what you also can do is take most of your newspaper's content off the web, so that you make your newspaper more valuable. And more people will buy your newspaper not only in print, but in E-editions. And our E-editions are doing extremely well. And they are paid circulation. We get paid for them, we get paid well for them, and our cost of producing them is not that high.

I think there's little chance more people will buy the print version of the paper, which Singleton acknowledges later in the interview, but he includes e-editions, which as I've written is a major MNG push.

Singleton rightly emphasizes e-editions' low production costs and that they show up in circulation reports. I still question whether advertisers, once they realize how big the e-factor has become, will pay the same ad rates for what I think is an inferior ad vehicle to print, at least as currently presented by St. Paul. But may be probably clever ways to add linkage and other dynamic features to overcome that.

The final thing I'll note is Singleton's observation that, "When we look at why people quit buying the newspaper, it's overwhelmingly because 'I can get it for free online.'"

That may be true, but the number one reason I get from people is that their paper has become tissue-paper thin with less and less original, local content. It's not the medium, it's the message.