Knight Ridder is no more. For too many months now, we have witnessed the slow-motion implosion of that once-mighty newspaper chain, and yesterday at 4 p.m. it evaporated in its entirety with the stroke of a pen.
With that, what was once the nation’s second-largest newspaper company went out of business, its various parts split asunder and parceled out to eight different owners.
Not surprisingly, bloggers who have cared enough to weigh in with final thoughts on Knight Ridder’s downfall over the past few days have mourned what has been lost.
BJ Retirees, the blog for former employees of the Akron Beacon Journal — the flagship of the old Knight Newspapers chain — noted this:
Missing for the first time today from the front page was the old, familiar gray stripe across the bottom which proclaimed:
>KNIGHT RIDDER> Information for Life
Knight Ridder has ceased to exist.
“I am not sure how I am supposed to feel this morning. The company I have worked for more than half my life no longer exists. For the first time in my professional life, I belong to somebody else,” wrote Ed Grisamore at Daily Gris, his blog for the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph. “A lot of parting shots have been fired at Knight Ridder in these past few weeks and months, but I have held my tongue. No, I haven’t appreciated what the company had become in recent years, a place where bottom lines seemed more important than headlines. It was sad to me. But you don’t stop loving a person just because they change. In many ways, Knight Ridder had to change to survive.”
But while Grisamore wrote that he is “forever indebted” to Knight Ridder for allowing him to earn a living as a writer, he expects the Telegraph “to have a different look and feel” under the McClatchy Co.
“I expect morale is going to improve, and it will reflect in the product,” Grisamore concluded. “I will rejoice, too, with a lump in my throat.”
“For as long as I’ve been able to read, and have cared about newspapers, I’ve known the name Knight Ridder,” wrote San Jose Mercury News design intern Ashley Dinges, who grew up reading “The Freep,” the Detroit paper that was Knight Ridder’s until it was cynically flipped to Gannett Co. last year.
“[I]’m very sad that this company is no more. Unlike the pros, I don’t have my life, time and money invested in the company. My feelings are for purely nostalgic reasons,” Dinges added. “[I]’ll miss Knight Ridder, even if I was only an intern here for the last month of its existence.”
“You can’t blame Tony Ridder for shedding a tear as his semi-eponymous company formalized its forced sale to McClatchy Newspapers,” wrote Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur. “The liquidation of Knight Ridder represents not only the end of a once-proud publishing company but also the passing of life-as-most-of-us-would-have-liked-it-to-remain for the newspaper business. Or does it?”
Meantime, other bloggers paid attention to more practical matters, from a change in logos at the top of the Knight Ridder Washington bureau’s Web site, to the replacement of the KRT wire with the McClatchy-Tribune wire, to “blacking out all of the Knight Ridder emblems on stationery.”
But we will leave the last word to blogger Douglas E. Jessmer.
“The Knight name will always be synonymous with great journalism; the Ridder name, on the other hand, may unfortunately be linked with selling out to investors,” remarked Jessmer. (As for “the Bruce Sherman name, let’s not go there.”)
“Knight Ridder, I hardly knew ye, but I admired you from afar,” he eulogized. “Rest in pieces.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.