From The New York Times:
The chairman and chief executive of Knight Ridder, P. Anthony Ridder, who sold the newspaper chain to the McClatchy Company on Monday, said last night that he resisted the sale and then sought to persuade McClatchy to keep most of the company’s 32 papers.
But immediately after acquiring Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion, McClatchy and its company’s chairman, Gary Pruitt, said they were putting 12 of the papers, nearly a third of them, back on the market.
“It’s terrible,” Mr. Ridder said, “the whole thing,” referring to the sale and splitting off the papers.
The acquisition of the newspaper chain will lead to the dissolution of a company that Mr. Ridder’s family started in 1892, a prospect that he called depressing in a telephone interview last night.
According to several reports, including this one, the Knight Ridder papers McClatchy plans to offload include: the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Akron Beacon Journal, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, The Wilkes Barre Times Leader, the Aberdeen American News, the Grand Forks Herald, the Ft. Wayne News-Sentinel, the Monterey Herald, and the Duluth News and Tribune.