A Christmas bedtime story

You won’t want to miss a nice story by Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about the sale of the newspaper.

Some quotes from the story:

When the McClatchy Co. got the keys to the Star Tribune in 1998, McClatchy's patriarch hailed the merger. James McClatchy called it a wedding of two newspaper traditions that shared "a deep-rooted commitment to building a just society." You now are permitted to laugh derisively.

Eight years later, hardly anyone in the newspaper business talks about anything other than building profit margins that would choke a robber baron.

Mercifully, Mr. McClatchy passed away in May and did not live to see the Sacramento-based company that bore his name disgrace his legacy by dumping its largest newspaper -- the most important one between Chicago and the West Coast, the one that serves 5 million Minnesotans and that can be a conscience, a scold, a cheerleader and an interpreter of life on the tundra.

On the day after Christmas, the McClatchy Co. took the Star Tribune to the return window and sold us to a company that removes medical wastes, drills for oil and (quoting its website) "operates four off-shore jack-ups, three mobile off-shore production units and one self-propelled completion and work over rig" in the Gulf of Mexico. Not to mention a newspaper in flyoverland.

Maybe we're an on-shore jack-up.

There are two possibilities:
1) A private equity firm with no newspaper experience will show the newspaper industry how to save itself, or
2) A privateer thinks the Star Tribune, with 2,000-plus workers, is ripe for plucking and pillaging.

Despite lip service to the cause of quality journalism, in the end McClatchy folded like a cheap lawn chair under a steady gale of Wall Street demands.

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt did not bother to come to Minneapolis on Tuesday to say he surreptitiously had sold the paper and to kiss us goodbye.

"The Star Tribune is one of the best newspapers in this country," Pruitt said in 1998. "The Twin Cities is one of the most attractive newspaper markets in the country. And it was a near-perfect fit in terms of values and traditions."

We didn't change. But you, Mr. Pruitt? We don't recognize you anymore. So long.

Don't bother to write.

Nick Coleman ● ncoleman@startribune.com

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