William Dean SingletonWilliam Dean Singleton, CEO of Media News, the St. Paul Pioneer Press’ parent company, says online pay models for news are the wave of the future. And in a new interview, he notes that the St. Paul paper is among his most profitable  properties using what he calls the “Media News model.”

In an interview with the Colorado Statesman, Singleton discussed changes to the Media News paper there, the Denver Post, but repeatedly noted that changes in Denver reflect those coming throughout his 54-paper empire.

One change: “You’re going to see less and less newsroom-generated copy online and more and more copy generated specifically for online. And we’re doing this company-wide. It’s not just Denver,” he said. “We’re going to move away from giving away our news content online for free — give a small amount of it away, and then air that out with reader-generated copy, with user-generated copy, with listings and other things online. We’re planning to make our online offerings much different than our print offerings.”

“We will be moving away from giving away most of our content online,” he continued, adding that such changes will be rolled out in the second half of this year:

I think the free sites we have will help us drive them to some of the pay sites.

There are two different kinds of pay sites. Obviously, the facsimile edition of the core newspaper — we sell all those now — I think The Post has 25,000 daily subscribers that pay and get the facsimile newspaper and the ads, but they get it online and they pay … I think we charge $30 a year for it, which is cheaper than the paper, and it’s cheaper for us to deliver. And that’s a growing number. We’re selling more and more of those at The Post.

Our biggest seller of online editions is St. Paul, Minnesota.

But while he specifically calls out the PiPress, he also sounds an ominous tone for paper’s like St. Paul’s, which competes with the larger Star Tribune.

“Second newspapers in competitive markets, they’re going away. There isn’t enough revenue to support them.”