The Fourth Estate is buzzing—can you hear it—with the announcement that Knight Ridder is being sold to McClatchy in a deal worth about $4.5 billion. It’s never good when newspapers get bought and sold like a corner lot near the interstate, but lots of folks are cheering the deal. The thought being that McClatchy runs good newspapers and cares about public-service journalism. On the other hand, the fact that no other bids really emerged might give the owners some pause.
In North Carolina, it means that the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer—the state’s two biggest newspapers—will be owned by the same company. South of us, Rock Hill, Columbia, Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head will all be under one owner. Is that a good thing? It’s too soon to say. Generally speaking, newspaper consolidation almost always leads to cost-cutting and sharing services. Efficiency is all well and good. But often, it’s the inefficiencies that define good newspapers.
The less-covered part of this deal is the back end. McClatchy will sell 12 of KR’s papers to help pay for the deal. And where these papers are says a lot about where some very bright people think the future of print journalism is and isn’t. The cities include Philadelphia (two papers) San Jose (where Knight Ridder has its headquarters!), St. Paul, and Akron (the ancestral home of the Knight publishing empire). These are big newspapers in metro markets, and many have done exceptional journalism in the past 10 years. That wasn’t enough. Another problem may have been unions. Many of these papers have guilds, and newspaper managers would just as soon not have to negotiate with them. The real question for these papers is who ends up with them now that they have been tagged as performance slackers.
McClatchy is instead betting on the Sunbelt. And by buying KR, it’s saying that the future of the newspaper is still strong in the right markets—and at the right price,
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
No deal. It’s all about money. All about readers of the Winston-Salem Journal paying their bills to someplace like Roanoke and other junk like that. The monolpoly and trust have other names now. But the rich get richer, and the rest of us get only invitations to wirte comments on blogs that no one will read for at least twenty-four hours despite the promise to foster “community.”
I disagree.
There’s not quite a bright line between a deal being about money and not being about money. The world is a place of grays. That’s what makes this arrangement so vexing. It could be very good. It could be a disaster. And different people will have different ideas and measures of success.
I also don’t think there is a monopoly on the news anymore. If people don’t like their news source, there are other places where they can go. The quality and variety and depth may be different, but it’s a lot like shopping. A newspaper can in some ways be viewed as a store that sells news. There are other stores that sell news, although they may not have the selection and quality that we offer at a reasonable price.
I usually read everything that comes across this blog within a few minutes of it being posted. The weekends are an exception. I try to monitor it every few hours without being obsessive. I don’t comment on everything because I’d rather get others talking. Good hosts don’t dominate the conversation. They just get it started.
You might just turn out to be cooler than I thought, Ken. And BTW, the only thing that’s really dreadful about blogs (all blogs, not just this one) has to do with what happens without a spell-checker. (See my first post to this thread for a fine example.)
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