NEW YORK – W. Dean Singleton took over as chairman of The Associated Press today, succeeding Burl Osborne, who is stepping down after five years as he retires from the news cooperative’s board of directors.
Singleton, vice chairman and CEO of ap Inc., was formally elected to the chairmanship by the board following the AP’s annual meeting.
Denver-based MediaNews is the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper publisher and owns The Denver Post.
Four incumbents and three new members also were elected to the board.
Singleton, 55, founded MediaNews in 1983. Together with its affiliated companies, MediaNews publishes 57 daily newspapers and about 120 non-daily publications in 13 states. It also owns a CBS affiliate in Anchorage, Alaska, and four radio stations in Texas.
Singleton started out in newspapers at age 15 as a part-time reporter in his hometown of Graham, Texas, and bought his first newspaper at 21. He served as chairman of the Newspaper Association of America in 2002.
Singleton was first elected to the AP board in 1999.
Osborne, publisher emeritus of The Dallas Morning News, joined that newspaper as executive editor in 1980 following a 20-year career with the AP. He later served as its president, editor and publisher and as a director of the paper’s parent company, Belo Corp. As chairman of AP, Osborne oversaw the 2003 selection of Thomas Curley, then president and publisher of USA Today, as president and CEO of the AP, and helped bring the not-for-profit news cooperative fully into the digital era.
Directors re-elected to three-year terms were Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., publisher and CEO of The Washington Post; Mary E. Junck, president and CEO of Lee Enterprises Inc.; Steven O. Newhouse, chairman of Advance.Net; and R. Jack Fishman, publisher and editor of the Citizen Tribune in Morristown, Tenn.
The new members are Charles V. Pittman, senior vice president-newspapers at Schurz Communications Inc.; Mary Jacobus, president and chief operating officer of The New York Times Co.’s Regional Media Group; and Victor F. Ganzi, president and chief executive officer of Hearst Corp. Ganzi will serve the one year remaining in Osborne’s unexpired term.
In addition to those elected, two current directors begin new two-year terms to which they were appointed by the board. They are Julie Inskeep, publisher of The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Ind., and David Lord, president of Pioneer Newspapers Inc.
Besides Osborne, two other board members are retiring: Joe Hladky, president and publisher of The Gazette Co., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and George B. Irish, president of Hearst Newspapers, New York.
The Associated Press, founded in 1846, is the largest independent source of news and information for all media platforms and formats.
On any given day, more than half the world’s population sees news from AP.
