Knight Ridder Inc.

P. Anthony Ridder is the CEO of Knight Ridder Inc..

McClatchy Company Buys Knight Ridder: On March 13, 2006, the McClatchy Company agreed to buy Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion in cash and stock.

Prior to the sale, Knight Ridder Inc. was a public company based in San Jose California with two business segments: Newspaper and Online. It was the nation's second-largest newspaper publisher and the largest publisher of newspapers in America's big cities. The company published over 30 daily newspapers and over 50 non-daily newspapers, delivering news to 9 million readers each day. The San Jose Mercury News was Knight Ridder's flagship newspaper.

While Knight Ridder was primarily a newspaper publishing company, it had a long and checkered history of involvement in electronic media projects. The company made an early and unsuccessful experiment with electronic news delivery using a system called videotex when it launched its Viewtron system in 1982, and was part of the ill-fated New Century Network project in 1994.

Knight Ridder also had investments in a range of online services including CareerBuilder, Cars.com and Real Cities. In March 2005 the company acquired a 25% stake in Topix.net, which is a news aggregator and distributor offering news categorized by topic and geographic location.

On the newspaper side, in February 2004 the company acquired Alliance Newspapers. And in February 2005, it acquired Priceless, LLC, a group of five free-distribution newspapers with a daily circulation of more than 55,000, located on the Peninsula south of San Francisco, California.

Knight-Ridder, Inc., was formed in 1974 by a merger between Knight Newspapers, Inc., and Ridder Publications, Inc. In 1903, Charles Landon Knight purchased the Akron Beacon Journal. Knight Newspapers was founded by John S. Knight, who inherited the Beacon Journal from his father in 1933. Ridder Publications was founded in 1892 when Herman Ridder acquired the German-language Staats-Zeitung in New York. Both groups flourished, each taking its stock public in 1969.

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Sarah Brooks   Chicago	Posted at 2:00pm on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
The Chicago Tribune carried many columns and stories by Knight-Ridder reporters in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004. I am a news junkie and read the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, BBCnews on line, etc. I couldn't understand why people in other parts of the country fell for all the stories leaked, pushed, referred to etc. by the Bush administration. I knew there was no meeting between an Al Quaida rep and Iraqi rep. I knew that Chalabi was on the take and not to be trusted. I knew that no yellow cake had been purchased in any part of Africa by Saddam, all because of Knight Ridder articles carried by the Chicago Tribune. I just didn't realize until the Bill Moyers journal, "Selling the War" that the Washington Post and the NYT didn't carry Knight Ridder articles. I like and respect the NYT, but I have never relied solely on it for my news. I have to salute your organization, your bureaus, your reporters, especially Johnathan Landay, and Stroebel, and the other gentleman whose name escapes me, for their dedication and determination, and especially their footwork and telephone work to get the truth and get it out there. I'm a university prof., now in MI, and standing in front of a class allows me to place newspaper articles from reputable sources on the overhead and say, "hey, guys, not so fast! you have to check several sources before you accept something as gospel!" But as you and I know, the vast majority of Americans get their news from tv only, and thus allowed themselves to be conned by the runup to the last presidential election into believing the most important crisis facing the US was gay marriage. Please keep up the good work. I'll put this in hard copy and send a better written comment to your address in San Jose. Sincerely, Sarah Osgood Brooks, Ph.D.

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