An Old-Fashioned Journalist
Charles Kenny McClatchy, known simply as C.K., inherited enough newspapers and enough money to work at anything he wanted to or at nothing at all. He chose journalism, and over the years his quiet, stubborn brand of integrity kept raising standards not only for his own newspapers but for all of journalism.
Slim, patrician and slightly old-fashioned, McClatchy often seemed out of place in an era of leveraged buyouts and manipulative politics, but he was never out of touch. After taking over the family chain of Bee newspapers, the first of which was founded in Sacramento by his great-grandfather in 1857, he set an uncompromising tone for editorials and news coverage that chopped away at pretense, sham and lapses in honesty at whatever risk of retaliation in the courts.
Typically, having expanded the chain of California newspapers by purchasing papers in Washington and Alaska, McClatchy used the forum of the Press-Enterprise lectures at UC Riverside last year to attack chain newspapering.
Mergers and buyouts, he said, too often put people with no newspaper tradition in charge of newspapers and made companies of all kinds less responsive to public interest. “The public and the government increasingly accept what used to be unacceptable,” he said.
Fortunately for his own newspapers and the many others that admired and identified with his high standards, C.K., who died at age 62 while jogging in Sacramento Sunday, never had any trouble identifying the unacceptable or any qualms about attacking it.
