Linking Chains
Two aggressive newspaper chains last week announced plans for one of the largest mergers ever. If the deal is approved by stockholders and government agencies, the Knight Newspapers, with 16 dailies in the Midwest, East and South, will soon join forces with Ridder Publications, which owns 19 dailies and eight weeklies mostly in the West. The resulting Knight-Ridder Inc. would be a formidable enterprise. With 35 daily papers and a total circulation of 3,496,000, the combine would be within striking distance of the leading chain, the Chicago Tribune group; its seven papers, which include the Tribune and the New York Daily News, have a daily readership of 3,549,000. The proposed deal is essentially an acquisition: Knight will swap stock worth some $158 million for 77,100 Ridder shares and dominate the enlarged chain's board of directors. Knight has been expanding steadily since the late Charles L. Knight, a former editor of the Woman's Home Companion, bought the Akron Beacon Journal in 1906. Under Knight's sons, John S., 79, and James L., 64, the chain has grown to 16 metropolitan dailies, including the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Ridder chain was built up by the heirs of Herman Ridder, a German immigrant who acquired a German-language daily in New York in 1890; though Ridder owns the New York Journal of Commerce, its other properties are located in Western states. Says Bernard H. Ridder Jr., 57, who would continue to run the papers as a Knight-Ridder subsidiary: "The merger logic is simple. We have a good geographical fit, and there's no conflict in circulation."
Though Editorial Chairman John Knight no longer writes his Pulitzer Prize winning column of political and social commentary every week, the two Knight brothers (who hold 47% of the chain's stock) are still active on the publishing side. Knight-Ridder's chairman and chief executive officer would be Lee Hills, 68, a North Dakota-born newspaper veteran who has been president of Knight since 1967. Hills aims to continue the editorial autonomy that has been traditional in both the Knight and the Ridder chains. "We don't think you can stamp newspapers out of cookie cutters," he says.
The Ridder papers include such varied properties as the Journal of Commerce, a useful if pork-belly plain compendium of business news; Colorado's folksy Boulder Daily Camera (circ. 22,380); and the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch, which occasionally outshines its bigger Twin City sisters. In general, however, the Ridder papers do not have the heft and influence of the Knight dailies. Though the Knight brothers are both conservatives, the papers are what Hills describes as "central progressive." In the 1972 election six Knight papers endorsed Richard Nixon and two backed George McGovern; only two echoed John Knight's own position, which was that he would not support either candidate.
The Knights and their editors do seem to agree on one point: that the papers should play a forceful role in the communities they serve. The Philadelphia Inquirer, once a model of police-blotter journalism, has become an important voice in local issues since Knight took it over in 1969. And in Florida the bribery and perjury charges lodged against Senator Edward Gurney last week were a direct result of dogged reporting by Knight's Miami Herald.
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