Pruitt never was a White Knight

In December, Gary Pruitt made a move that sent shock waves through the industry, dumping The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the biggest paper in the McClatchy chain. Not just that, but he sold it for $530 million — less than half of what he paid for it eight years before.

That sale has tarnished Mr. Pruitt’s reputation in newsrooms.

“If you had this warm and fuzzy feeling about being taken over by McClatchy, I suspect that has dissipated,” said John Morton, an industry analyst “As a financial steward, you couldn’t get anybody to run your company better than Gary Pruitt, but you can’t look at everything from a financial steward point of view. For heaven’s sake, newspapers are a public trust. He’s acting as if he’s running a green bean cannery.”

Morton is quoted in a story by Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times.

Mr. Pruitt himself says he remains confident about the future of newspapers and defends the sale of The Star Tribune. It provided a big tax benefit for McClatchy, he said, and the company is using the proceeds to help pay off the $2 billion debt it incurred in buying Knight Ridder.

“I never thought of us as the white knight,” Mr. Pruitt said of the Knight Ridder purchase. “I thought of us in more prosaic terms — it was an opportunity to make an attractive acquisition on our terms, to strengthen the company long-term.”

There is much more in Seelye’s article. Click on the headline to go there.