6 Knight Ridder Newspapers Await Outcome of McClatchy Auction
Six former Knight Ridder Inc. newspapers awaited word on their fate Wednesday as McClatchy Co. collected offers on the final day of bidding for the newspapers, the last of 12 that McClatchy intends to sell.
The other six newspapers have already found new owners, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, which was sold to a local investor group there, and four others that were bought by MediaNews Group Inc., a privately held company based in Denver.
That leaves six newspapers in smaller markets, the largest of which is the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio. There was no immediate word on how many bids were submitted for those papers, when new owner McClatchy might decide on possible buyers or whether the papers would be sold as a group or one by one.
McClatchy, based in Sacramento, bought San Jose-based Knight Ridder’s 32 newspapers in March and decided to sell 12 of them, largely because they were in slower growing markets.
Among the papers remaining, most attention has focused on the Akron Beacon Journal, once the flagship of Knight Newspapers, a predecessor to Knight Ridder.
Advance Publications Inc. in New York, parent of the Beacon Journal’s biggest competitor and Ohio’s largest newspaper, the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, was believed to be among the possible bidders for the Akron newspaper. The papers are located about 40 miles apart and compete in some of the faster growing Cleveland and Akron suburbs.
La Jolla-based Copley Press Inc., parent of the Repository of Canton, Ohio, 25 miles south of Akron, also reportedly was interested in the Beacon Journal.
In both cases, merging the nearby papers might offer advantages through joint advertising sales and combined business side, printing and reporting work.
Savings through merged operations would make sense for either Advance or Copley, according to Larry Grimes, president of W.B. Grimes newspaper brokerage in Gaithersburg, Md. He said he had heard of “plenty of interest” in all six papers but had no direct knowledge of any bids.
The remaining five papers to be sold were the American News in Aberdeen, S.D.; the Duluth News Tribune in Minnesota; the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota; the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind.; and the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Other possible bidders that have been mentioned include Yucaipa Cos. of Los Angeles, which is working with a newspaper union; Black Press Group Ltd. of Victoria, Canada; and HM Capital Partners of Dallas.
McClatchy and HM Capital had no comment Wednesday. Advance, Copley, Black and Yucaipa didn’t immediately return messages Wednesday.
The Beacon Journal has won four Pulitzer Prizes, journalism’s highest honor. The newspaper’s most recently reported average weekday circulation was about 128,000 for the six months that ended in March, down 7% from the same period last year. The population of Akron, once the nation’s tire-making capital, has been stable in recent years, down about 2% since 2000 to about 220,000.
An industry report in early May showed that daily circulation fell 2.5% at U.S. newspapers in the six-month period that ended in March. Newspaper circulation has been in general decline for years as many people, particularly young adults, turn to other media outlets, including cable TV and the Internet, for news and information.
Charles Knight bought the Akron newspaper in 1903 and became publisher four years later.
His son, John S. Knight, became editor and publisher in 1933. He began a series of purchases that made the Beacon the flagship of one of the nation’s largest newspaper groups, Knight Newspapers. In 1974, the group merged with Ridder Publications to become Knight Ridder Inc.
