Knight Ridder

Knight Ridder
Media company
Fate Purchased by The McClatchy Company
Founded July 11, 1974 (1974-07-11)
Defunct June 27, 2006 (2006-06-27)
Headquarters San Jose, California, United States

Knight Ridder /ˈrɪdər/ (from Dutch: ridder, knight) was an American media company, specializing in newspaper and Internet publishing. Until it was bought by The McClatchy Company on June 27, 2006, it was the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States, with 32 daily newspapers sold. Its headquarters were located in San Jose, California.[1]

History

Origins

The corporate ancestors of Knight Ridder were 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 New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, a German language newspaper, in 1892. As anti-German sentiment increased in the interwar period, Ridder successfully transitioned into English language publishing by acquiring The Journal of Commerce in 1926.

Both companies went public in 1969 and merged on July 11, 1974. For a brief time, the combined company was the largest newspaper publisher in the United States.

At its peak

The Knight Ridder building in downtown San Jose, California.

Knight Ridder had a long history of innovation in technology. It was the first newspaper publisher to experiment with videotex when it launched its Viewtron system in 1983. After investing six years of research and $50 million into the service, Knight Ridder shut down Viewtron in 1986 when the service's interactivity features proved more popular than news delivery.[2]

Knight-Ridder purchased Dialog Information Services Inc. from Lockheed Corporation in August 1988. In October 1988, the company placed its eight broadcast television stations up for sale to reduce debt and to pay for the purchase of Dialog.[3]

In 1997 it bought four newspapers from The Walt Disney Company formerly owned by Capital Cities Communications after Disney's purchase of Cap Cities mainly for the ABC television network (the Kansas City Star, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Belleville News-Democrat and (Wilkes-Barre) Times Leader) for $1.65 billion. It was, at the time, the most expensive newspaper acquisition in history.

For most of its existence, the company was based in Miami, with headquarters on the top floor of the Miami Herald building. In 1998, Knight Ridder relocated its headquarters from Miami to San Jose, Calif.; there, that city's Mercury News—the first daily newspaper to regularly publish its full content online—was booming along with the rest of Silicon Valley. The internet division had been established there three years earlier. The company rented several floors in a downtown high-rise as its new corporate base.

In November 2005, the company announced plans for "strategic initiatives," which involved the possible sale of the company. This came after three major institutional shareholders publicly urged management to put the company up for sale. At the time, the company had a higher profit margin than many Fortune 500 companies, including ExxonMobil.[4]

Purchase by McClatchy

On March 13, 2006, The McClatchy Company announced its agreement to purchase Knight Ridder for a purchase price of $6.5 billion in cash, stock and debt.[5] The deal gave McClatchy 32 daily newspapers in 29 markets, with a total circulation of 3.3 million. However, for various reasons, McClatchy decided immediately to resell twelve of these papers.[6]

On April 26, 2006, McClatchy announced it was selling the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Monterey Herald, and St. Paul Pioneer Press to MediaNews Group (with backing from the Hearst Corporation) for $1 billion.[7]

List of newspapers

Daily newspapers owned by Knight Ridder and its predecessors – listed alphabetically by place of publication – included:

Knight Ridder-owned companies

A list of companies that were at one time or another owned by Knight Ridder:

  • Vu/Text: 1982–1996. Merged with PressLink to become MediaStream.
  • PressLink: ??–1996. Merged with Vu/Text to become MediaStream.
  • MediaStream: 1996–2001. Acquired by NewsBank[8]
  • DataStar: Acquired from Radio Schweiz Ltd., merged with Dialog to form Knight Ridder Information
  • Dialog (online database): Merged with DataStar to form Knight Ridder Information
  • Knight Ridder Information: ??–1997, Acquired by MAID, later by Thomson
  • Knight Ridder Financial Inc: 1985–1996. Acquired by Global Financial trading as Bridge Data.
  • RealCities Network:[9] 2004–2006. RealCities was a portal/hub website for Knight-Ridder group. It was absorbed with The McClatchy Company into McClatchy Interactive[10] and sold to Chicago-based Centro[11] in 2008.

Knight Ridder-owned television stations

In 1954, Ridder Newspapers launched WDSM-TV in Superior, Wisconsin, serving the Duluth, Minnesota market. Initially a CBS affiliate, it switched to its present NBC affiliation a year and a half after the station's launch. It was spun off after Ridder's merger with Knight Newspapers, Inc.

From 1956 to 1962, Knight co-owned a then-NBC affiliate, WCKT in Miami, Florida, with the Cox publishing family.

In 1977, Knight Ridder entered broadcasting with the acquisition of Poole Broadcasting, which consisted of WJRT-TV in Flint, Michigan, WTEN in Albany, New York and its satellite WCDC in Adams, Massachusetts, and WPRI-TV in Providence, Rhode Island. Immediately after the acquisition of these stations was finalized, Knight Ridder cut a corporate affiliation deal with ABC, switching then-CBS affiliates WTEN/WCDC and WPRI (the latter of which eventually rejoined CBS) to ABC (WJRT was already affiliated with ABC when the affiliation deal was made). Knight Ridder would acquire several television stations in medium-sized markets during the 1980s, including three stations owned by The Detroit News which the Gannett Company (which purchased the newspaper in 1986) could not keep due to Federal Communications Commission regulations on media cross-ownership and/or television duopolies then in effect. (None of Knight Ridder's later acquisitions changed their network affiliations under Knight Ridder ownership; for example, then-NBC affiliate WALA-TV in Mobile, Alabama remained an NBC affiliate when it was owned by Knight Ridder and would switch to Fox several years after Knight Ridder sold the station.) In early 1989, Knight Ridder announced its exit from broadcasting, selling all of its stations to separate buyers; the sales were finalized in the summer and early fall of that year.

Notes:

  • (**) - This station was co-owned by Knight Newspapers and Cox Newspapers, long before Knight's merger with Ridder Publications.
  • (++) - This station was owned by Ridder Publications until the merger between Ridder and Knight forced its divestiture.
City of license / Market Station Channel
TV (RF)		 Years owned Current ownership status
Mobile, Alabama - Pensacola, Florida WALA-TV 10 (9) 1986–1989 Fox affiliate owned by Meredith Corporation
Tucson, Arizona KOLD-TV 13 (32) 1986–1989 CBS affiliate owned by Raycom Media
Miami, Florida WCKT 7 (7) 1956–1962 ** Fox affiliate, WSVN, owned by Sunbeam Television
Flint, Michigan WJRT-TV 12 (12) 1978–1989 ABC affiliate owned by Gray Television
Albany, New York WTEN 10 (26) 1978–1989 ABC affiliate owned by Nexstar Media Group
Adams, Massachusetts WCDC
(satellite of WTEN)		 19 (36) 1978–1989 defunct; station was taken off the air in November 2017
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma KTVY 4 (27) 1986–1989 NBC affiliate, KFOR-TV, owned by Tribune Broadcasting
Providence, Rhode Island WPRI-TV 12 (13) 1978–1989 CBS affiliate owned by Nexstar Media Group
Nashville, Tennessee WKRN-TV 2 (27) 1983–1989 ABC affiliate owned by Nexstar Media Group
Norfolk, Virginia WTKR 3 (40) 1981–1989 CBS affiliate owned by Dreamcatcher Broadcasting, LLC
(operated through a SSA by Tribune Broadcasting)
Superior, Wisconsin - Duluth, Minnesota WDSM-TV 6 (19) 1954–1974 ++ NBC affiliate, KBJR-TV, owned by Quincy Media

    Media

    • Shock and Awe (film)

    Notable people

    References

    1. ↑ "Where We Are." Knight Ridder. April 28, 2005. Retrieved on August 28, 2012. "Knight Ridder 50 W. San Fernando St. San Jose, CA 95113" and "Knight Ridder Digital 35 South Market Street San Jose, CA 95113-2302"
    2. ↑ "Viewtron Remembered Roundtable". Archived from the original on 2012-10-20. Retrieved 2012-10-19.
    3. ↑ "Knight-Ridder Puts 8 TV Stations on Block to Reduce $929-Million Debt". Los Angeles Times. AP. October 4, 1988. Retrieved January 26, 2016.
    4. ↑ The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/business/yourmoney/27knight.htm?pagewanted=all. Missing or empty |title= (help)
    5. ↑ "mcclatchy.com". Archived from the original on 2006-04-09. Retrieved 2006-04-11.
    6. ↑ By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and ANDREW ROSS SORKINMARCH 13, 2006 (2006-03-13). "nytimes.com". nytimes.com. Retrieved 2018-04-09.
    7. ↑ medianewsgroup.com Archived 2006-05-26 at the Wayback Machine.
    8. ↑ "infotoday.com". infotoday.com. Retrieved 2018-04-09.
    9. ↑ "RealCities Network". Archived from the original on 2012-08-13. Retrieved 2012-07-31.
    10. ↑ "McClatchy Interactive". Archived from the original on 2012-08-03. Retrieved 2012-07-31.
    11. ↑ "Centro". Centro. 2018-01-18. Retrieved 2018-04-09.

    • Seelye, Katharine Q.; Andrew Ross Sorkin (2006-03-12). "Knight Ridder Newspaper Chain Agrees to Sale" (Free). The New York Times.

    Further reading

    • Merritt, Davis (2005). Knightfall: Knight Ridder and How the Erosion of Newspaper Journalism Is Putting Democracy at Risk. New York: Amacom. ISBN 0814408540.
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