As he has before, MediaNews Group’s new chief executive John Paton declared again yesterday at a digital conference in San Francisco that the newspaper business is “irretrievably” broken. The headline of the Mercury News piece reporting it? “Newspaper leaders see promising future.”
Add: That hoped-for future is on the Web, of course, where Paton is optimistic about revenue prospects and the ability of his chain, which includes the Bay Area News Group papers, to tap into the free labor of readers helping supply content.
Noted: Meanwhile, as long as we’re putting MediaNews and digital future in the same sentence, it should be noted that BANG’s personality-less, one-size-fits-all, casually refreshed websites remain stuck in the journalism stone age.
