Knight Ridder
USINFO | 2013-07-15 10:14
     
 
Knight Ridder /ˈrɪdər/ was an American media company, specializing in newspaper and Internet publishing. Until it was bought byThe 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.
 
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 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.

At its peak
Knight Ridder had a long history of innovation in technology. It was the first newspaper publisher to experiment with videotex when it launched its Viewtronsystem in 1982. After investing six years of research and $50 million dollars into the service, Knight Ridder shut down Viewtron in 1986 when the service's interactivity features proved more popular than news delivery.
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 the history of the newspaper business.
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.

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.  The deal gave McClatchy 32 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.
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
 
美闻网---美国生活资讯门户
©2012-2014 Bywoon | Bywoon