The hilarious and whimsical nameplate above was published Monday along with a story titled “Gutting the Local Paper: Dean Singleton, Tom Honig and the Santa Cruz Sentinel” on the Web site of the Santa Cruz Independent Media Center. The content is all too familiar in cities large and small across the U.S.: Media News Group buys local paper, sells off real estate, eliminates jobs, moves to cheaper digs in the suburbs — what Seinfeld’s Elaine might call the “yada, yada yada of Dean Singleton.”

The acquisition, the article points out, was accompanied by the usual MNG disinformation: The paper will continue to be printed locally … no layoffs are planned … yada, yada, yada.

Mirroring the white flight of the 1960s, Dean Singleton’s abandonment of downtown Santa Cruz comes hard on the heels of his abandonment of downtown Oakland, where the “Trib Tower” now stands as a reminder and a symbol of Media News Group’s lack of any real concern for the cities in which it operates.

It’s a strategy that flies in the face of a half-century tradition established by U.S. newspapers that once really were part of the fabric of their communities. The urban decay that set in during the late 50’s and picked up steam over the next two decades surely would have destroyed many of our cities had it not been for the unflinching support of three institutions that generally refused to join the flight to the suburbs: federal, state and local governments; the headquarters and back offices of banks and other financial institutions; and local newspapers, whose local owners fully understood that a downtown is not only the heart of a city, but its identity as well.

They stuck it out until bottoming-out real estate prices, federal tax incentives and yuppie-led gentrification rescued many American cities from certain death and forged a new urban Renaissance. The importance of all of which appears to completely escape one William Dean Singleton, who never has seen a downtown he wouldn’t abandon if the price were right.

To his credit, I should point out that Dean isn’t anti-downtown; indeed, if he found economic gain from selling a suburban plant and moving to cheaper space in a downtown, he would do that with equal haste. So, residents of Santa Cruz and Oakland and numerous other cities large and small, rest assured: It’s nothing personal.

With Citizen Dean, it never is.