Flood of stories on KRI woes

The stories of Knight Ridder’s woes keep coming. Today they were from the American Journalism Review and the Los Angeles Times. Even Bob Giles, our old m.e.and now a curator at Harvard, weighs in.

"A big investor’s threat to Knight Ridder is bad news for the newspaper industry," writes Rem Rieder, editor of American Journalism Review.

“Greed is good, Michael Douglas (as Gordon Gekko) said famously in the movie "Wall Street." But it's not so good for the newspaper business,” write Rieder.

“The beleaguered industry took another shot across the bow last week when something called Private Capital Management, which owns 19 percent of Knight Ridder's stock, called upon the nation's second-largest newspaper company to put itself up for sale. And if that didn't happen, the big shareholder said it would support a hostile takeover.

“This was a seriously menacing development. As Doug Clifton, editor of Cleveland's Plain Dealer and before that a longtime Knight Ridder editor, told the Los Angeles Times, the ploy "has the feeling of a momentous event."

“Seems the 19.4 percent profit the company made last year just didn't satisfy the high-flyers at the money management firm

It's enough to make you feel bad for Tony Ridder. Here the guy is flogged relentlessly for cutting back, but to Private Capital Management he's a big spender.

Click on the headline above for all of this great piece.

And then there was the Los Angeles Times headline

As Knight Ridder Goes, So May News Industry

Investor pressure to sell the San Jose-based chain comes as papers across the country are losing circulation at an accelerating pace.

Click here to read the LA Times piece, but here is the lead:

As big shareholders of Knight Ridder Inc. pressure executives to consider selling the nation's second-largest newspaper company, an increasing number of industry veterans say the fight's outcome could write the future of print journalism.

Like other chains, Knight Ridder has responded to readers and advertisers migrating to the Internet by investing in Web versions of the print product, cutting costs and experimenting with free papers.

But as industrywide circulation figures released Monday made clear, the most traditional form of journalism is losing ground at an accelerating pace. Of the country's 20 largest daily newspapers, only two sold more copies in the six months through September than they did in the same period a year before, and the overall 2.6% drop in weekday circulation was the biggest since 1991.

"Those who are responsible for running these companies have not been able to make the kind of adaptive changes they need to in order to stay competitive," said Bob Giles, curator of Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Although newspaper companies still are more profitable than many other industries-- operating margins of more than 20% are common -- revenue is growing slowly and corporate owners are tending to funnel earnings into other areas rather than pay them out as dividends.

Knight Ridder's situation illustrates a larger predicament for newspaper executives, who are under pressure to improve their product at the same time that they are being urged to cut expenses to increase profits.

The most recent circulation declines at the Mercury News, the Herald and the Inquirer came to a cumulative 3.7%. Among bigger papers, the Los Angeles Times' average weekday circulation fell 3.8% to 843,432 and the Washington Post's declined 4.1% to 678,779. With its national circulation strategy, the New York Times had the only significant gain in the top 20, adding 0.5% for just over 1.1 million subscribers.