One by one, many of the old newspaper families – the Chandlers who controlled Times Mirror, the Ridders of Knight Ridder and, most recently, the Bancroft family of Dow Jones – have given up their companies, either through consolidation or outright sales.
"This is an irritant that we deal with, people who try to hijack the briefing for ideological reasons," said Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder, president of the White House Correspondents Associationn.
The judge ousted Mr. Ridder, publisher of The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, before an expected trial on monetary damage claims by its rival, The Pioneer Press of St . Paul
The publisher until its sale to McClatchy in 2006, Par Ridder, son of P. Anthony Ridder, chief executive of Knight Ridder newspapers, has been embroiled in a widely publicized court case surrounding his departure from The Pioneer Press.
Staats-Zeitung was the Teutonic seedling from which the Ridder half of the Knight-Ridder chain bloomed, while the publishers of Il Progresso, at one time a pro-Mussolini paper, begat the old New York Enquirer, which begat the National Enquirer).
Knight Ridder, owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, reported a 53percentt decline in first-quarter profit yesterday on stock option expenses and costs from its planned sale to McClatchy.
PAGE A21 Paper in Search of an Owner The sale of Knight Ridder to McClatchy makes The San Jose Mercury News a castaway in a dot-com world.
P. Anthony Tony Ridderer P. Anthony Tony Ridderer, the 61-year-old chief executive of Ridder, is keenly aware of this as he struggles to keep the U.S.'s second-largest newspaper company independent.
[C3.] Knight Ridder Shareholder Urges Sale of Company Knight Ridder, the publisher of 32 daily newspapers including The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer, has come under fire from its largest shareholder, who yesterday demanded that the company put itself up for sale.
In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history.
