Free Republic

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Knight Ridder Inc. (KRI.N: Quote, Profile, Research), the newspaper publisher being acquired by McClatchy Co. (MNI.N: Quote, Profile, Research), said on Monday first-quarter earnings fell 53 percent as stock-based compensation and sale-related expenses undercut profits. Net profit fell to $28.4 million, or 42 cents a share, from $60.5 million, or 79 cents a share, a year earlier. Stock-based compensation depressed first-quarter earnings by 5 cents per share, and sales-related expenses knocked 6 cents off the bottom line. A 12 percent decline in national ad revenue also dragged on earnings. Analysts, on average, expected the company to...

While most mainstream media outlets earned the scorn that has been heaped upon them for their stenographic reporting of the Bush Administration's prewar claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, one newspaper chain's Washington bureau was consistently--and, it turns out, correctly--skeptical of the White House. Before the war began, Knight Ridder's small but able team of reporters was the exception to a bad rule, producing a steady stream of now widely praised articles with headlines that referred to the "Failure to find weapons in Iraq" and "Troubling questions over justification for war in Iraq." But the war that might have...

NEW YORK Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder told staffers at his company's San Jose Mercury News on Wednesday that he had started raising money to buy that paper and two others in California now being sold by The McClatchy Co.--but has stopped at the urging of his lawyers and investment bankers. The other two papers were The Monterey County Herald and the Contra Costa Times. He held two meetings Wednesday with the staff of the Mercury News, according to Pete Carey's account in the Thursday edition of the paper. The three newspapers are among the 12 "orphans" put up for...

NEW YORK Moody's Investors Service cut its debt ratings on Knight Ridder Inc. and McClatchy Co. Wednesday and indicated that they may both be further downgraded to junk status due to a debt increase after the recent sale of Knight Ridder to McClatchy. Earlier this month McClatchy agreed to purchase Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion. The company will assume $2 billion of Knight Ridder's debt and will further borrow $3.75 billion to execute the deal. Knight Ridder and McClatchy were both given Moody's "Baa3" rating, the service's lowest investment-grade rating. Moody's said that a "significant increase in leverage" from the...

NEW YORK A union representing newspaper workers complained Friday that it was not receiving full access to financial information from The McClatchy Co. that it needs to make a bid on 12 newspapers that McClatchy wants to sell. McClatchy said earlier this month that it intended to sell the papers, which include The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury News, as part of its deal to acquire Knight Ridder Inc., the nation's second-largest newspaper company. McClatchy intends to keep the other 20 papers owned by Knight Ridder. The Newspaper Guild-CWA said it was told by McClatchy that the union...

Bruce Sherman, the Knight Ridder shareholder who launched the crusade to force a sale of Knight Ridder, paid an average of $65 a share for his stock; the sales price was $67.25. SAN JOSE, Calif. - Nearly five months after Knight Ridder's largest shareholder launched a crusade to force a sale of the San Jose company, Bruce Sherman's efforts appear to have earned him mixed results. On Monday, Sherman apparently got his wish when McClatchy announced it would buy Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest newspaper company. But the price -- $67.25 a share in the $4.5 billion deal -- is...

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,...

Employees of the San Jose Mercury News, fearing that the planned sale of their newspaper will lead to staffing and coverage cutbacks, launched a website Thursday that asks readers to push for a new owner committed to high-quality journalism. Www.savethemerc.com appeared just four days after McClatchy Co. said it intended to sell the Mercury News and 11 other papers around the country as part of its $4.5-billion acquisition of Knight Ridder Inc., a San Jose-based chain that owns 32 daily papers. The website asks readers, community leaders and advertisers in Silicon Valley — the heart of the 155-year-old Mercury News'...

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...

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...

Anybody want to buy a couple of struggling newspapers in Philadelphia? How about San Jose? Akron? Aberdeen, S.D., perhaps? With intense competition from the Internet and shrinking advertising revenue, these are tough times in the newspaper business. But McClatchy Co. is banking on the prospect that its cast-offs -- even ones suffering the most from the challenging media environment -- may be somebody else's treasure. Yesterday McClatchy, as expected, announced a $4.5 billion cash-and-stock deal to buy Knight Ridder Inc., the nation's second-largest newspaper publisher by circulation, with 32 dailies. But McClatchy said it intends to keep only 20 papers...