Now even MediaNews Group, which has employed Righthaven’s services in relation to its newspapers like the Denver Post (it has about 50 of them) is saying the whole thing was a “dumb idea.”

Wired, who interviewed CEO John Paton, quotes him as saying: “The issues about copyright are real. But the idea that you would hire someone on an — essentially — success fee to run around and sue people at will who may or may not have infringed as a way of protecting yourself … does not reflect how news is created and disseminated in the modern world….I come from the idea that it was a dumb idea from the start.”

The publisher terminated its relationship with Righthaven in August, and Paton just assumed his new role last week, replacing Dean Singleton.

It will be interesting to see if Righthaven’s other partners, namely Stephens Media (which publishes the Las Vegas Review Journal), follow the lead of MediaNews Group.

Judges have been ruling on the side of fair use in recent Righthaven cases, essentially rendering the company’s services ineffective. Though the appeal process must still play out, things aren’t looking incredibly bright for the future of this copyright “protection” strategy.

Let’s talk about MediaNews Group first.  It operates 54 daily newspapers with a combined daily circulation of 2.4 million.  Corresponding websites are part of the mix, as are a TV station and some radio stations.

As for the organization’s take on blocking Google, CEO Dean Singleton told Greg Bensinger and Brian Womack that some pay walls are going up next year, and "[t]he things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic."

Then there’s A.H. Belo to consider.  It owns and operates four papers and 12 sites, and is weighing a similar approach.  Only Executive Vice President James Moroney seemed less than interested in search traffic, saying, "It’s akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer."

The idea of keeping Google away from content appears to be gaining a bit of momentum, then, and with some additional prodding from Microsoft, Rupert Murdoch’s idea could go further than critics first expected.

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MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton wrote a memo to employees saying, "We cannot continue to give all our content away for free."

William Dean Singleton

"We continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free," the memo said. "Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business — the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily."

Under the proposed plan, nonpaying readers would have access to shorter versions of articles, while print subscribers would continue to receive full access to the newspaper’s website for free.

The memo also details the decline of print advertising as well as slower growth for the company’s online advertising.

"Our interactive revenue growth has slowed because it has been too closely tied to our print classified business, which has suffered with the advent of Craigslist and other free online classified opportunities," the MediaNews memo says.

"[And] we are not significantly extending the reach of our audience, as our online products too closely resemble the newspaper, and thus fail to meaningfully reach the next generation of readers."

MediaNews did not say when it would start to charge for online content. The company said it will "build a strategic plan that places a value on our content, protects our core print business, extends the reach of our audience, and creates new revenue opportunities online."
 

Kaboodle and Kaango are hardly identical, but their names and identities (a social shopping community and classifieds site, respectively) are comparable.  MediaNews is entirely new to the scene, though, and in a filing with the SEC, it stated, “Kaango will be held by a newly formed limited liability company, which is 50% owned by each of Hearst and the Company.”

The same filing also spoke to the future of this venture, continuing, “The remaining 20% of Kaango is owned by its founders and is subject to a call option and is expected to be purchased in the future.”

This sounds like an odd situation, yet is a fairly routine arrangement, and amounts to a bet on the part of Hearst and MediaNews that Kaango will become more valuable.  There was no hint as to when (or at what cost) the option might be exercised.

In other news related to this deal, Rafat Ali states, “MediaNews also reported its revenues: it lost $1.01 million in Q3, compared to a profit of $13.3 million in the year-ago quarter.  Revenues were $334.7 million, up from $295.3 million a year ago, thanks to acquisitions of San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, The Monterey County Herald and St. Paul Pioneer Press.  It didn’t break out its online revenues, but did say that revenues remained flat.”