Publisher McClatchy buys Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion

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New York (dpa) - Mid-sized US newspaper publisher McClatchy Company acquired the country's second largest publisher, Knight Ridder, for 4.5 billion dollars, thereby becoming the country's second largest publisher itself, both companies announced Monday.

Sacramento, California-based McClatchy said it would also assume 2 billion dollars of Knight Ridder's debt, taking the total figure for the deal to 6.5 billion dollars.

The deal comes during a period of uncertainty for the newspaper industry as readers and advertisers increasingly turn to the internet, resulting in falling profits and job cuts at newsrooms around the county.

After the planned sale of 12 Knight Ridder newspapers, McClatchy is expected to have a total 32 daily newspapers and 50 other publications with total sales of 3.2 million copies in its portfolio.

On this basis, McClutchy would have had sales of 2.8 billion dollars in 2005 and a profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of 754 million dollars.

Among the papers acquired by the family-controlled firm are the San Jose Mercury News, Miami Herald and Philadelphia Inquirer. Knight Ridder's other key assets include Internet holdings like the Real Cities network of local-information sites; stakes in the CareerBuilder.com job-classifieds Web site, the Classified Ventures LLC consortium for online house and car classifieds, and news monitoring company Topix.net.

"This is a terrific buy for McClatchy," journalism professor Conrad Fink told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It elevates them tremendously in one big gulp. It gets them into national play in Internet services, which is very, very important."

McClatchy currently publishes 12 dailies and 17 nondailies and its largest paper is the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

"This is going to be a great relief to a lot of people who are interested in high-quality journalism," Fink said. "McClatchy has a reputation as being not only a well-run company, but one that prides itself on putting out good newspapers."