McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt Performs a 'Baghdad Bob'

Remember Baghdad Bob? He was the Iraqi press spokesmen who caused much amusement in the West because of his unrealistically upbeat pronouncements when Iraq was invaded by the United States and its allies in 2003. Among Baghdad Bob's funnier announcements was his declaration that no Americans were in Baghdad at the same moment when American troops were patrolling the streets of that city just a few hundred yards from where he was holding that press conference. Well, the newspaper industry has its own Baghdad Bob in the form of McClatchy CEO, Gary Pruitt, who in early 2007 gave his own unrealistically upbeat reports to his company's employees on the purchase of Knight-Ridder in 2006. That purchase quickly turned into an utter disaster as evidenced that the former Knight-Ridder flagship newspaper, the Miami Herald, is now being put up for sale by McClatchy. Below are a few excerpts from the 2007 video of Pruitt performing his Baghdad Bob routine including a bizarre invocation of that great "philosopher," Lenny Kravitz:

"In Umm Qasr, the fighting is fierce and we have inflicted many damages. The stupid enemy, the Americans and British, failed completely. They're not making any penetration."

In 2006, your humble correspondent e-mailed Gary Pruitt about an idea I had on how to increase the Miami Herald's web traffic by utilizing that newspaper's vast photo archives. Of course, no reply from Pruitt. This was on the heels of me contacting the Herald's editor, Tom Fiedler, who replied that he LOVED my idea. The downfall for this idea came when Fiedler passed it along to the Herald's online editor. That editor also liked the idea but was scared of making waves. The online editor mumbled something to me about not having enough "resources" to undertake the project even on a limited experimental basis. I replied that one of their college interns with some knowledge of computer programming could set the whole thing up in a matter of days. More mumbling excuses about "not enough resources" from the same online editor.

And now the Miami Herald has lost so many readers that it is up for sale. So how is that "resources" thing working out for you, Mr. Online Editor?

When I worked in the News Photo dept. of the Tampa Tribune I was always after them to do more with their hundreds of thousands of images going back over 75 years. But alas, they are going down the tubes because no one in a position of authority has the ability to think outside the box. They've done it a certain way for 100 years and that's the way they intend to keep on doing it.

We had tens of thousands of 2 1/4 negatives, indexed complete with a copy of the article they were used with, in storage. The room where they were kept was right next to the photo lab so when things were slow I'd go in there and spend time just perusing the files. Fascinating!

Working at the Trib was my first real experience of working in the corporate world of today where everything is driven by the stock price. They simply refused to listen to anyone who was working there and would buy into all sorts of third-party products and ideas.

When they realized they were losing readers to TV and the Internet their response was to try to make their paper more like the TV and Internet, instead of working to make it a better paper that did things the others simply could not do. They had a really half-assed program for selling copies of pictures that had run in the paper. With 40 plus full time photographers on the staff they were taking hundreds of pictures every day, 99.9% of which were never used. They would not make these pictures available. They only ones they would sell were the ones that actually got published. This was at the insistence of the legal eagles. Everything at the paper was run first by the the legal people and then by the bean counters. The paper had daily what was left over after those two got through scaring the hell out of everyone.

Sad story.

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