McClatchy era begins at The Miami Herald

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McClatchy era begins at The Miami Herald



RICHARD GILMORE/SACRAMENTO BEE FILE
AT THE HELM: Gary Pruitt, chairman of the board, president and chief executive of McClatchy Co., visits the newsroom at the Sacramento Bee.


BY CHRISTINA HOAG
June 26, 2006

The blue neon ''Knight Ridder'' sign atop the cement shoe box on Biscayne Bay that houses The Miami Herald Media Co. will soon be gone. Gone, too, is Knight Ridder itself, the publishing firm's longtime parent.
But no other corporate sign will take its place. The Miami Herald's new owner, Sacramento-based McClatchy Co., is arriving with little fanfare, after buying Knight Ridder in a $4.5 billion deal set to close Tuesday.

The low-key nature of the takeover is typical of McClatchy, which has a reputation as an unpretentious player in the media industry. Most people describe McClatchy much as they might the sensible aunt in a flamboyant family, one that has kept up solid work while maintaining a wary eye on the pocketbook.

Now McClatchy will walk the line between quality journalism and pumping up profits on a much larger scale, at a time when most newspapers are squeezed between those demands.
McClatchy's performance will be watched closely in South Florida and by the troubled newspaper industry as it becomes the second-biggest company after Gannett, owner of USA Today. McClatchy last year posted $160 million in net profit on $1.186 billion in revenue, up two percent from 2004.

Gary Pruitt, McClatchy's CEO, says the company is girding for the challenge -- and not unduly focused on current market attitudes.
''We do our best not to be influenced by the current sentiments on Wall Street, but rather to look at facts and look at evidence and make long-term decisions for the company based on what the evidence shows,'' he said last week.

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''You won't see much of any change for the first couple years,'' said Frank Daniels Jr., the former publisher of the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer who sold the paper to McClatchy in 1995. ``They've got a very steady approach.''
McClatchy Co. was founded in 1857 with the inauguration of The Sacramento Bee by Irish immigrant James McClatchy, who like thousands of others at the time forsook the potato famine for the California Gold Rush. Through the years, other newspapers were added.

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