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AKRON, Ohio - The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation submitted a bid this year to buy John Knight's first newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal.
But the foundation decided to bow out after the asking price climbed too high, foundation President Alberto Ibarguen said at the Akron Roundtable Thursday.
``The price that was offered, the amount of money that was offered was, we thought, very significant, and ultimately it was our decision that it would have been unwise to go that high,'' Ibarguen said.
Black Press Ltd. of Canada ultimately bought the Beacon Journal for $165 million from the California-based McClatchy newspaper company, which had acquired the Beacon Journal when it bought Knight Ridder Inc. in June.
McClatchy kept 20 Knight Ridder newspapers that it said are in growing markets, and it sold the Beacon Journal and 11 others.
The Knight Foundation has a $2.2 billion endowment built on the Knight family's investments in newspapers and has invested about $100 million in the Akron area.
Ibarguen would not say how much the foundation offered for the paper, but he said it wasn't close to the winning bid.
We were told early on what the price was likely to be, and so we did not make a second bid,'' Ibarguen said.But we were interested. Well, think about it. We're the biggest funder of journalism programs anywhere in the world.''
The foundation hoped to make the Beacon Journal a laboratory for new journalism ideas in the age of the Internet, drawing on the talents of the nation's major journalism schools.
``I don't know what we would have done, but the point is that it deserves experimentation, and what better place to do it than in a really good, live newsroom?'' Ibarguen said.
The setup might have been similar to that of Florida's St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
``We wouldn't have owned it directly; we probably would have set up another specific foundation to do it,'' Ibarguen said.
Foundation board Chairman Dr. W. Gerald Austen said that although Akron retains a privileged status among the foundation's beneficiaries, the trustees couldn't justify buying the newspaper.
``The expense of buying it was awfully high relative to how we could spend our funds in other good causes in our cities as well as journalism, so we backed off,'' Austen said.
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(c) 2006, Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio). Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.
