Free Republic

A once-great newspaper chain reaches the end of the line. By Rem Rieder Rem Rieder (rrieder@ajr.umd.edu) is AJR's editor and senior vice president. You could feel the heat. And it had nothing to do with the tropical weather. The intensity in the newsroom of the Miami Herald, circa 1982, was simply astonishing. The Herald had all the elements. A stunning collection of talent. A venue where you had the sense that anything could happen, and it did. And a determination to put out a kick-ass, elbow-above-the-rim newspaper that seemed to be embedded in the very walls of the building. I...

ONLY a handful of days have passed since he announced the deal to sell Knight Ridder, but P. Anthony Ridder, the company's chairman and chief executive, already has ghosts to contend with. The biggest, of course, is the pending disappearance of the company his great-grandfather, Herman, founded in 1892 — Ridder Publications, which merged in 1974 with Knight Newspapers to create what has for much of recent memory been the nation's second-largest newspaper group, with 32 dailies. But he also has to wrestle with the fact — apparently unknown to him until the deal was sealed — that the buyer,...

NEW YORK Knight Ridder Senior Vice Presidents Arthur Brisbane and Hilary Schneider will lose their jobs as a result of the McClatchy acquisition of Knight Ridder. Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder told his corporate staff on Monday that they would not have jobs with McClatchy, according to The Kansas City Star’s Mark Davis. The senior vice presidents along with other executives are committed to stay with the company until the deal closes. If they leave before the close, they will walk away from a payment equal to three times their current salary and bonus. In an interview with Davis, Brisbane...

Q: Professor News, should those of us who care about newspapers be worried about the sale of Knight Ridder Inc. to the McClatchy Co., or should we be encouraged? A: Both. We should be worried because there was no competing bidder for Knight Ridder, the country's second-biggest newspaper company, which says something about the problems of the newspaper industry. But we should be encouraged by the acquisition, characterized as "a dolphin swallowing a whale." It shows that McClatchy has enough confidence in the future of print, be it on paper or on a screen, to pony up $4.4 billion in...

Published: March 16, 2006 11:45 AM ET WASHINGTON, D.C. After 41 years on the military beat, covering stories from Fort Riley, Kan. to Vietnam and Iraq, Joe Galloway says he is taking a permanent leave. Come June 1, the 64-year-old scribe will give up his desk at Knight Ridder’s D.C. bureau and settle permanently in the bayfront cottage he owns just north of Corpus Christi, Tex. “I consider myself the luckiest guy in the world to have survived against the odds, to have had the experiences, the stories, the people that this profession has given me,” Galloway said this week...

NEW YORK McClatchy's shares continued to slide Wednesday, closing at $50.72, down 4.7 percent from their value before Monday, when thye company announced that it will buy Knight Ridder. The decline of McClatchy's stock price "says some people don't like the deal," Wall Street analyst Ed Atorino of Benchmark Co., a New York investment firm, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. There is great "uncertainty" about what McClatchy can get for the 12 KR papers it now plans to sell. But he added that McClatchy Chairman Gary Pruitt "is a smart guy" who has managed big mergers in the past....

Newspapers discover creative destruction. McClatchy Co.'s offer to buy Knight Ridder Inc., the second-largest newspaper chain in the U.S., has elicited another round of soul-searching about the newspaper business, not to mention a good deal of Schadenfreude on both the Internet-based right and left. The fact that there was only one bidder is said to be yet more evidence that newspapers are dying--oh, no!--or it means that Drudge shall inherit the earth, yippee!

Knight Ridder-McClatchy Newspaper Deal Reveals Ties To Clinton-Gore Financier Yucaipa March 13, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLinenews.org - The long anticipated sale of troubled newspaper publisher Knight Ridder was announced Sunday, with California based McClatchy Co agreeing to a deal valued at $6.5 billion. McClatchy immediately announced it will sell off 12 of KR's low-growth potential products which include the San Jose Mercury and the [much maligned here] Contra Costa Times. The surprise McClatchy offer breaks down to $67.25 a share, of which the San Jose Mercury reports, "$40 of that in cash and the rest in McClatchy...

No deal is hatched without a wider meaning to be gleaned on Wall Street and in the media, and that's all the more true for the ever-reinventing media industries themselves. The latest, the sale of Knight Ridder to McClatchy, presents a Rorschach-like finale that reconfirms both hopes and fears for the newspaper business. Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest newspaper company agreed to be purchased by McClatchy, ending a corporate drama that began almost five months ago with a revolt of major Knight Ridder shareholders, according to Knight Ridder's own San Jose Mercury News and other media. A source tells the...

Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest newspaper company by circulation, agreed last night to sell itself for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock to the McClatchy Company, a publisher half its size, according to people involved in the negotiations. (snip) Still, McClatchy, which is based in Sacramento and publishes the Sacramento Bee and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, among others, was the only major newspaper company to submit a final bid for Knight Ridder, publisher of such venerable newspapers as the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury News. (snip) Under the terms of the deal, McClatchy agreed...

McClatchy Co. appeared yesterday in the pole position to purchase the Knight Ridder Inc. newspaper chain, people familiar with the matter said, offering a combination of cash and stock valued at more than $65 a share, or more than $4.35 billion. Bids for Knight Ridder were due yesterday at 5 p.m. EST, and, as in any auction, the situation was fluid and subject to change, even past the stated deadline. But a consensus was building that McClatchy was the favorite, as it appeared MediaNews Group Inc. was fading from the scene and a large private-equity group including Texas Pacific Group...

NEW YORK The Newspaper Guild's "worker friendly" plan to buy nine Knight Ridder papers is still in the works even as the deadline for bids looms. However, don't expect the Newspaper Guild to be named tomorrow as a possible buyer, said Linda Foley, the Guild's president, in a prepared statement released this afternoon. "While we have had substantial discussions with each of the potential bidders, we have not, nor did we expect to, reach an agreement with any of the bidders prior to March 9th." The Newspaper Guild is positioning itself as a sidecar to those other players making bids...

Published: March 08, 2006 11:05 AM ET NEW YORK McClatchy is the likely front-runner in the Knight Ridder bid, according to a report released by Merrill Lynch this morning. Final bids for the company are due tomorrow. But a lengthy analysis in the Minneapolis Stat-Tribune today, based on interviews with investors, pegs the more likely winner as the Gannett/MediaNews pairing. "Based on trade speculation on Tuesday, we believe a successful McClatchy bid is slightly more probable but is far from a slam dunk," wrote Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine. For several years there has been speculation among industry watchers...

Thursday could be a pivotal day in the history of the U.S. newspaper industry. That's the deadline for bidding on Knight Ridder Inc., the storied chain with 32 daily newspapers that bring the news to readers' doorsteps from Philadelphia to San Jose, Calif. And the size of the bids will be the best temperature taken on the health of this stately old business in some time. If the bids are high -- above $70 a share or so, for a total of about $4.7 billion -- it would signal that Wall Street hasn't given up on the newspaper industry and...

Published: February 06, 2006 10:00 AM ET NEW YORK Gannett Co. appears to have dropped out as an independent bidder for all of Knight Ridder Inc. and may instead try to join a group seeking to buy the San Jose-based newspaper company, Reuters has reported, citing sources close to the sale process. They say that Gannett skipped a meeting with Knight Ridder this week to go over the company's financial data, a sign it will not bid independently. Instead, Reuters reported, Gannett may try to forge an agreement with Denver-based publisher MediaNews Group Inc. and its partners. MediaNews has been...

All Things Considered, December 29, 2005 · Unhappy investors have forced the Knight Ridder newspaper company to put itself up for sale. Profits are healthy, but level. Now, the Newspaper Guild of America is exploring whether it can put together deals to purchase as many as nine of the company's newspapers.

The Akron Beacon Journal, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning paper now operating as a 'zine for the geriatric set, is getting squeezed to comedic proportions by San Jose's Knight Ridder, its parent company. Knight Ridder is under a dual assault by investors, who are demanding 30 percent profit margins, and the company's own leadership, namely CEO Tony Ridder, the heir-in-charge who's proved strikingly adept at running Knight Ridder into the ground. Executives recently asked employees to share pens and notepads with other departments, since no more office supplies will be purchased this year. The problem is that some departments have already...

According to sources with ties to third-party groups opposing the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel Alito, the Knight Ridder newspaper analysis of Judge Alito's judicial record -- which ran in many of the papers operated by KR -- mirrors analysis that was pulled together by staff of People for the American Way, Alliance for Justice, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, all groups that are coordinating their anti-Alito efforts. "The analysis and cases are similar to what we pulled together in the first week of the nomination. Some, but not all of the same cases, that kind of...

COMPANY TESTING BREADTH OF INTEREST AND POSSIBLE PRICE Knight Ridder, under pressure from three major shareholders to sell the San Jose company, has begun soliciting preliminary bids from potential purchasers in an attempt to determine who might be interested in buying it, and how much they'd be willing to pay, according to sources familiar with the process. The move does not mean the nation's second-largest newspaper group and owner of the Mercury News has committed to selling itself. Instead, the request for bidders to submit what is commonly called an ``expression of interest'' is the next step in a process...

Troubles abound for the print business, but smart leadership can steer through the roughest seas Good news about the newspaper business is hard to find these days. Already this month, daily circulation losses ... At the demand of disgruntled institutional shareholders, once-proud Knight Ridder - the nation's second-largest publicly traded chain - is considering putting itself up for sale, whole or in pieces. This comes on the heels of deep news staff cuts at many of the nation's most respected regional papers, Newsday included... Important trends are downward and reinforcing... Profit margins, down from their peak, but still at 20...