Why McClatchy keeps Knight Ridder bureaus

By Rem Rieder, American Journalism Review
In a recent column decrying the cutbacks in foreign coverage by the U.S. media, I mentioned that much of the burden now falls on the major national newspapers.

But there's also a newspaper chain that hasn't turned its back on the world.

McClatchy has a network of nine bureaus that it inherited when it swallowed up Knight Ridder last year. They are in Baghdad, Beijing, Berlin, Cairo, Jerusalem, Mexico City (now vacant), Moscow, Nairobi and Rio de Janeiro, although the company plans to mothball Berlin and open an outpost in South Asia, perhaps later this year.

Both AJR columnist John Morton and I have blasted McClatchy for cherry-picking Knight Ridder, unloading papers that weren't in high-profit, go-go markets, and for jettisoning Minneapolis' Star Tribune. The new owner of the latter, the private equity group Avista Capital, promptly took an ax to the staff.

But McClatchy deserves props for keeping the foreign staff and blending the strong Knight Ridder Washington operation with its own. Knight Ridder had distinguished itself with its against-the-grain reporting on Iraq, and that tradition has continued under McClatchy. John Walcott, who was Knight Ridder's bureau chief, kept that role with McClatchy, directing the operation with Washington Editor David Westphal. Another Knight Ridder vet, Mark Seibel, oversees the foreign coverage as the bureau's managing editor for international news.

So why is McClatchy maintaining those costly foreign bureaus while some Tribune Co. papers and the New York Times Co.'s Boston Globe are shutting them down, when the ubiquitous mantra in the newspaper business is "local, local, local"?

"Global news is local news nowadays," Howard Weaver, the company's vice president for news, wrote in an e-mail to AJR. "There's never been a time in our history when world events had greater impact on Americans--terrorism, security and war in Iraq, obviously, but also immigration, job outsourcing, international trade, African genocide and the possibility of pandemic flu or other global diseases. Does this seem like the right time to cut back?"

Click on the headline to read the full story by Rem Rieder in the American Journalism Review