Knight Ridder

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For the television series, see Knight Rider.

Image:Knight Ridder HQ.JPG Knight Ridder (Template:IPA2) Template:Nyse is an American media company, specializing in newspaper and Internet publishing. The company owns 32 daily newspapers throughout the United States, and is the second largest newspaper publisher in the nation, behind Gannett. The company's headquarters are located in San Jose, California. The company reached an agreement to be purchased by The McClatchy Company in March 2006.

1 History
2 List of newspapers
3 Trivia
4 External links

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History

The corporate ancestors of Knight Ridder are Knight Newspapers, Inc. and Ridder Publications, Inc. The first company was founded by John S. Knight upon inheriting control of The Akron Beacon Journal from his father, Charles Landon Knight, in 1933; the second company was founded by Herman Ridder when he acquired the German language Staats-Zeitung newspaper in 1892. As anti-German sentiment increased between the two world wars, Ridder successfully transitioned into English-language publishing by acquiring the Journal of Commerce in 1926.

Both companies went public in 1969 and merged in 1974. For a brief time, the combined company was the largest newspaper publisher in the United States.

Knight Ridder has a long history of innovation in technology. It was one of the first newspaper publishers to experiment with videotex when it launched its Viewtron system in 1982, was one of the first to actively develop newspaper content for America Online in 1993, and joined the ill-fated New Century Network project in 1994.

Its current flagship newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, was one of the first daily newspapers to regularly publish its full content to the World Wide Web. Around 2000, KR moved its headquarters from Miami to be closer to its rising star in San Jose (although it chose to rent a sleek downtown high-rise rather than build new office space).

Many argue that the quality of Knight Ridder newspapers has suffered in recent years as its president, Tony Ridder, has cut staffs and budgets to achieve a profit margin of more than 20 percent. Knight Ridder supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq in all its newspapers.

In November of 2005, the company announced plans for "strategic initiatives", which may involve the possible sale of the company. This came after major shareholders publicly said the company was worth less than the sum of its parts and urged management to put the company up for sale. The Newspaper Guild tried to work with an investment firm to take control of the Knight Ridder papers where it represented the journalists. Knight Ridder said it would only sell the company as a whole, not individual papers, and the Guild responded that if that happened, the investment group would try to buy some of the papers from the new owner. The new owner could be forced to put some papers up for sale to comply with antitrust laws.

On March 13, 2006, The McClatchy Company announced their agreement to purchase Knight Ridder for a purchase price of $6.5 billion in cash, stock and debt. The deal will give McClatchy thirty two daily newspapers in 29 markets, with a total circulation of 3.3 million. However, for various reasons, McClatchy decided to immediately resell twelve of these papers. [1]

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