Sympathy for the CEO in Sacramento

The Sacramento NewsReview.com, an alternative news site to the Sacramento Bee, has posted a long, convuluted treatise by R.V. Scheide on Gary Pruitt with this header:.

Sympathy for the CEO
Sacramento Bee parent McClatchy Company is headed for the bottom. Company head Gary Pruitt aims to stem the tide, or go down with the ship.

The article has only three or four graphs focusing on Pruitt's problems. One is the speculation about the company’s future created when Pruitt resigned from four McClatchy trusts. The rest of the article mosty talks about how Scheide and Pruitt are both Rolling Stones fans. The photo of Pruitt with his sleeves rolled up accompany the article.

Here are the three graphs.

Since Pruitt began engineering the risky, controversial purchase of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain three years ago, McClatchy’s price per share has plummeted nearly 90 percent. It’s as if the company clawed its way up the Cables Route, only to plunge down the 4800-foot precipice on the other side.

As this issue was going to press, Pruitt resigned from four trusts that control 80 percent of McClatchy’s voting stock, sparking speculation that the publicly traded company may go private—a move that would undoubtedly anger shareholders—with Pruitt cast as the fall guy.

Pruitt says that’s nonsense, but everyone’s waiting for the splat. However, Pruitt has defied the odds before. In a decade of industry decline and stiffening competition from the Internet, the boyish, charismatic CEO known to quote Rolling Stones lyrics charted a steady course to the top. Then the bottom fell out of the real-estate market, sucking McClatchy and the entire newspaper industry down with it. They’re already calling 2008 the year the newspaper died.

It is the worst year of Gary Pruitt’s life.

Click on the headline if you like.