A Cautionary Tale for Old Media from 1990

Robert D. Ingle who was executive editor of the headquarters newspaper of Knight Ridder saw early on the web threat which the San Jose Mercury News is still trying to survive.

On Jan. 19, 1990,. Ingle wrote a remarkably prescient memo to his bosses at the newspaper chain Knight Ridder. Typing at night in his breakfast nook on an Apple II PC, he envisioned that a global information network would emerge, giving rise to all manner of online communities. And he proposed an online service, Mercury Center, aimed, his memo said, at "extending the life and preserving the franchise of the newspaper."

Knight Ridder is mentioned 19 times in the 28-graph story in Business Week.

The memo was written nearly four years before programmers created the first Web browser and long before Google and social networking exploded onto the scene, yet Ingle seemed to anticipate much of what would come. He laid out strategies for the entire chain: Give information to readers however they wanted it, integrate the print and online operations, and dream up new forms of advertising. "I saw the Internet as a great opportunity, but also as a great threat," says Ingle, who retired in 2000.

If Ingle's proposal had been enthusiastically embraced by Knight Ridder's 28 dailies, perhaps the fate of the chain might have been different. As it was, an epic shift of advertising over to the Web would cut the economic legs out from under the Mercury News and other Knight Ridder papers such as the Miami Herald and Philadelphia Inquirer. From 2000 to 2003, help-wanted ads at the Mercury News plummeted from $121.5 million to $17.9 million. Last year, Knight Ridder was forced to sell out. The Mercury News eventually wound up with MediaNews Group, whose chief executive, William Dean Singleton, is reviled by many journalists as a low-cost publisher of second-rate papers.

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