Knight Ridder

» see knightridder.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Two newspaper families agreed to merge on 11 July 1974, and the result was the biggest chain in the United States by circulation. Knight Newspapers came out of Akron, where Charles Landon Knight had bought into the Beacon Journal in October 1903 and taken full control by June 1909. Ridder Publications came out of New York, where Herman Ridder had been running a German-language daily called the Staats-Zeitung since 1890. The joined company held 35 papers and 3.6 million daily circulation, against Gannett's 54 papers and 2.3 million. Lee Hills got the chairmanship and Alvah Chapman Jr. got the presidency.

What the company accumulated over the next two decades was a shelf of city institutions rather than one national masthead. The Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press came in under Knight in 1937 and 1940. The Philadelphia Inquirer cost $55 million in October 1969. The San Jose Mercury News had been a Ridder paper since July 1952, and in April 1998 the whole corporation moved its headquarters from Miami to San Jose, for the stated purpose of looking less like a newspaper company and more like a high-technology information provider. It had already bought Dialog Information Services off Lockheed in August 1988 and put its eight television stations up for sale to help pay for it.

The part of this that travels worst is the part that mattered most. A chain of metro dailies is a local product by design, and even the famous names in it, the Miami Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer, were read in their own cities and almost nowhere else. In 2002 and 2003 the Washington bureau filed the reporting on Iraqi weapons intelligence that the national papers did not, and because Knight Ridder had no flagship, some of its own member papers declined to run it and substituted copy from The New York Times instead. Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel took the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for it in 2004. Columbia Journalism Review called the work unequaled by the Bigfoots at the bigger outlets. Being right was worth an award and no circulation.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

By the mid-nineties the company was buying at scale. Lesher Communications went for $360 million in August 1995. In April 1997 it paid Disney $1.65 billion for four papers at once, among them the Kansas City Star and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The trophy case reached 84 Pulitzer Prizes in 79 years of publishing.

It was also early to the idea that newspapers would eventually be read on screens, and it was early twice. Viewtron burned more than $50 million over six years before Knight Ridder closed it in 1986. Mercury Center put the full San Jose paper online in 1993. New Century Network was the industry consortium that was supposed to make all of this add up and did not. All three were paid for while the print business was still printing money, and all three have graves of their own on this site.

~ the revolt ~

In November 2005 Private Capital Management, which held about nineteen percent of the shares, sent the board a letter telling it to pursue a competitive sale of the company. Two more institutional holders said much the same in public. The company was not losing money when this happened. Its operating margin was better than a good many Fortune 500 firms, ExxonMobil included. What the shareholders objected to was not the profit, it was the direction of the line.

The board announced strategic initiatives, which is the phrasing a company uses when it has agreed to be sold and has not said so yet. On 13 March 2006 The McClatchy Company announced the deal at $6.5 billion, a figure that includes the debt McClatchy took on. Shareholders approved on 26 June. The purchase closed on 27 June 2006, the second day of McClatchy's fiscal third quarter.

~ what got buried with it ~

McClatchy had no intention of keeping all of it and said so immediately. Twelve of the 32 dailies were resold for a combined $2.078 billion. The Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times went to a MediaNews joint venture. The Philadelphia papers went to a group of local investors. The St. Paul Pioneer Press went to Hearst, which had agreed in advance to pass it along to MediaNews. The Akron Beacon Journal, the paper the Knight half of the company had been built on since 1903, went to a Canadian publisher.

The Washington bureau was folded into McClatchy under its own name and kept filing for a while. The twenty papers McClatchy held on to went through another fourteen years of cuts before McClatchy filed for bankruptcy protection in February 2020 and ended up owned by a hedge fund. Bruce Sherman, who wrote the letter in 2005, had cleared out of newspaper stocks entirely by 2008.

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