Weak Friends

When the McClatchy Company was announced as the winner of the sweepstakes to buy Knight Ridder, they said they would in-turn sell some of the weaker papers, such as the San Jose Mercury News, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Akron Beacon Journal--where Mr. Knight himself was the founder.

Prior to the sale stories began circulating that the newspaper guild--the employees labor organization--was interested in purchasing Knight Ridder. These reports were largely discounted because the guild lacked necessary resources. With the announcement of the intention to break off portions of the chain comes a new and more credible effort by the newspaper guild to buy some of the papers.

According to Editor and Publisher such a deal would be financed by the Yucaipa Corporation. This may well be the right move for the employees, but the performance of Yucaipa is even worse than Knight Ridder. Yucaipa seems to be set up to invest in shaky liberal/left enterprises.

So if functionaries from the Democrat party team up with labor unions to publish newspapers, what can we expect the product to amount to? (answer: no change)