The Denver Post
Richard Scudder, who with Dean Singleton built MediaNews Group into the second-largest newspaper chain by circulation and then saw the company go into bankruptcy in 2010, died early Wednesday.
Scudder’s career in newspapers started in the 1930s, as a reporter at the Boston Herald and the Newark Evening News, which his grandfather had founded, according to the Post’s obituary.
“The newspaper business generally has fallen into the hands of people other than those who grew up in the newsroom,” Scudder said in a 1988 interview. “That’s not the case with Dean and myself. We’ve been reporters, and we’ve been out in the street. I don’t know how you could judge a newspaper to be good or not so good unless you’ve lived in the newsroom for a while.”
An interesting footnote: Scudder was one of the inventors of a process that removed ink from newsprint, which gave birth to the recycled newsprint industry.
