McClatchy becomes America’s No 2 newspaper firm

Tuesday March 14th 2006, 10:25 am
Filed under: Newspapers

American media minnow McClatchy jumped from eighth place in the US newspaper market to second yesterday with the USD 4.5bn (EUR 3.7bn) acquisition of larger rival Knight Ridder, owner of the San Jose Mercury and Philadelphia Inquirer. The deal sounded a note of confidence in the US local newspaper market where advertising revenue has been coming under intense pressure from online alternatives such as Google. McClatchy, which is paying in cash and shares for the company and assuming USD 2bn (EUR 1.6bn) of debt, plans to sell off a dozen of Knight Ridder’s 32 newspapers including the Inquirer and Mercury as well as The Philadelphia Daily News, because it does not believe it can increase sales of the titles. The combined group will have 32 daily newspapers and 50 non-daily publications, after McClatchy’s planned sell-off, with a combined daily circulation of about 3.2m. It will be the second largest US newspaper publisher in circulation terms, behind Gannett, whose 91 papers have 7.3m daily paying readers. (Media Guardian,March 14, 2006)

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