The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation submitted a bid this year to buy the Akron Beacon Journal., but the foundation decided to bow out after the asking price climbed too high, foundation President Alberto Ibarguen said at the Akron Roundtable Thursday.
``The price that was offered, the amount of money that was offered was, we thought, very significant, and ultimately it was our decision that it would have been unwise to go that high,'' Ibarguen said.
Black Press Ltd. of Canada ultimately bought the Beacon Journal for $165 million from the California-based McClatchy newspaper company, which had acquired the Beacon Journal when it bought Knight Ridder Inc. in June.
The Knight Foundation has a $2.2 billion endowment built on the Knight family's investments in newspapers and has invested about $100 million in the Akron area.
The foundation hoped to make the Beacon Journal a laboratory for new journalism ideas in the age of the Internet, drawing on the talents of the nation's major journalism schools.
``I don't know what we would have done, but the point is that it deserves experimentation, and what better place to do it than in a really good, live newsroom?'' Ibarguen said.
The setup might have been similar to that of Florida's St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
Click on the headline to read John Higgins story on the Beacon Journal business page.
No comments:
Post a Comment