NYT piece on demise of Knight Ridder

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/business/yourmoney/27knight.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1156683940-dqCjTi3kMKsfOeKHjhMVdA&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin


Decent read.

 

Couple interesting clips from the article:
-- [Some say] Mr. Ridder’s decision to sell helped persuade Wall Street that the company’s management lacked confidence in the industry’s future. The sale was a sign of defeat.

-- "That pitch was based in part on a report by Morgan Stanley, which had said that a new owner could save $150 million a year by reducing Knight Ridder’s work force by 5 percent, trimming benefits and streamlining corporate expenses. Knight Ridder also suggested that copy-editing functions could be consolidated, even among far-flung papers."

Last sentence is very disturbing. Of course, that's the way we're going, but someone in Dubuque with no knowledge of the Philadelphia scene should not be editing local copy for the Inquirer.

 

This is true, of course, but this has been going on for years in a less extreme way. Early in my career I worked at one of the early "clusters" before they became common in the newspaper biz, where the copy was edited two counties away from one paper's base and none of the copy editors lived in (and some never even visited) the territory they were editing. Later, I worked in a very expensive place to live where many of the people commuted vast distances from cheaper places to live and neither read the paper nor knew the locale. And I believe we had a discussion here a few months ago about the Newark paper taking on the copy editing for the Trenton paper.

 

I thought Newark only was editing national wire copy, and local copy still was being handled in Trenton.

Whole different ballgame there.