Content Bridges

Can McClatchy Help Drive a Network As It Sells Off 12 Papers?

Two words:  Clustering. Network.

Those are two words of the moment in the newspaper industry.

Clustering is, and has been, the strategy of the last decade. It's the notion of owning multiple properties within a region. Certainly the major daily, and then suburban dailies, thrice-weeklies and even weeklies.  It affords newspaper companies the chance to achieve certain efficiencies. Efficiencies like centralized printing plants, single prepress facilities, less redundancy in finance and sometimes in circulation. Sometimes the opportunity for editorial efficiencies, depending on much circulation territories overlap.

In a couple of words: cost savings. In a business of eroding margins, clustering is a good idea. We can see that notion playing out as McClatchy sells off  12 lower-margin, lower-growth, largely unionized properties it won in the Knight Ridder purchase. Media News seeks the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times, to complement its San Francisco East Bay holdings in its Alameda Newspaper Group. Lee may be seeking several small Knight Ridder dailies in the Dakotas and Minnesota, and maybe Saint Paul's Pioneer Press, to sit side-by-side Bismarck and Rapid City. Gannett may have the appetite for the Philadelphia Inquirer to augment the regional reach of its Cherry Hill (NJ) and Wilmington (Del.) dailies.

Cost savings, though, aren't enough to save a news industry, rapidly losing readers to online sites, where they contribute little is any revenue to news companies.  Pew's new study, released last week, throws still more evidence on the newspaper pyre that young news readers are reading lots of news -- online.

What news companies need, in addition, is growth. In the digital world, scale is everything and the network is the key to user satisfaction and building big business models. Which brings us back -- all recent roads seem to start from here lately -- to the McClatchy deal.

Gary Pruitt made a sound business decision in deciding to jettison the Philadelphia papers, the Pioneer Press, the Akron Beacon Journal and, perhaps, the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times in the Bay Area. Reasonable, if he wants to meet the acquisition goals he'd set out for McClatchy the last couple of years.

In addition to those goals of owning properties in higher population growth areas, though, Pruitt has got to stake out a new plan for transforming his business.  It's the same challenge all news companies have -- transforming themselves from print ad companies to Internet ad companies quickly -- but one that just got huge for Pruitt. McClatchy, after all, is becoming the second biggest newspaper company, even after its divestment of the 12 properties.

Pruitt has pledged to sell off the 12 in the best interests of the McClatchy shareholders. (Some of those shareholders may well raise the question of why he apparently limited first-round bidding only to newspaper companies, reducing the chances of a successful bid by the Ron Burkle/Yucaipa-backed Value Plus group, a group that has deep pockets.)

Certainly McClatchy wants to defray as much of its $4.5B KR sales price, hoping to fetch somewhere between $1.4-2B for the 12. But Pruitt shouldn't miss another opportunity: a chance to take a leadership role in new network building in the news industry.

The news industry has long been picked apart and picked off by aggregators like AOL, Google, Yahoo and MSN. Not that you can blame those companies. It hasn't been so much as divide-and-conquer as victory-by-one-offs. News companies, with the ghost of the their fledgling network New Century Network long forgotten, have failed to come together and negotiate jointly and effectively with the big boys.

Now Pruitt has a couple of those network pieces in place. Consider these expanded potentials that McClatchy's sale of 12 papers could either energize or further splinter:

• Real Cities Network: Owned and run by Knight Ridder, this network of more than 100 papers acts as a sometimes-effective national ad sales network. It could be a lot more, offering synergies and efficiencies in ad sales, negotiations with the aggregators especially on paid search, creation of a single cost-efficient platform, etc.  Or it can stay on the sidelines of the battle.
• Career Builder, Classified Ventures: Knight Ridder owns a third of Career Builder (recruitment) and a smaller percentage of Classified Ventures (auto, real estate). McClatchy is buying those shares, but partners Tribune and Gannett can "buy out" McClatchy's Career Builder shares if they wish. Pruitt has said he wants to keep the shares, but the outcome is uncertain.  CB and CV are at a crossroads.  McClatchy can assume KR's role in both and bring in more paper partners (if they have aggressive sales teams), or it can be bought out in CB and see a product fighting for market share against numerous competitors weakened.
• KR Washington Bureau, Knight Ridder Tribune Wire Service: In an era in which the NYT faltered in its Iraq coverage, many point to the leading work of the KR Washington Bureau in incisive, original reporting. With the sale of of papers, and key staff positions, in Philly and San Jose, the talent level and staffing of the WashBuro are lessened. KRT has done an impressive job of acting as a clearinghouse for top features, photos and graphics.  Owned 50/50 by Tribune and Knight Ridder, McClatchy will have to sort out its role here as well. Again, these services can be strengthened or weakened, depending on McClatchy's moves.

What does this mean to the moment? In selling the 12 properties, McClatchy should look both to its new national leadership role and its need to transform its business. In addition to the fetching the highest bid per property, it can add sales requirements that buyers also "buy into" these networks, in serious, meaningful ways.  Certainly Gannett can take a push as it works through the TKG unrolling. Media News can join a grander coalition.  Lee can see how it can benefit from collective organization. Indeed, the other potential buyers, including Yucaipa, can be told that joining the network(s) is part of the admission price.

One more notion for our times. Dan Gillmor has raised the question, "Saving the Mercury News: Can Yahoo Help?" Good question, but apparently Terry Semel hasn't warmed to the idea. But Gary Pruitt could take the idea and run with it, enlisting Yahoo as a strategic partner, helping to solve the business riddles of print/online bundling and news user interaction. Maybe as a McClatchy minority partner or ?

Strange times can indeed make strange bedfellows.

McClatchy and National/Local Paradox

Many more questions for Gary Pruitt out there as he and his McClatchy team make the rounds. (Pruitt is in New York this week talking up his company to the analysts.  McClatchy shares had fallen 10% since the KR purchase announcement, though they're up recently. Good salesmanship.

Busy week. Meanwhile WebHead Chris Hendricks and VP/News Howard Weaver make the rounds of press and paper, as the Little Company That Wants To,  saying all the right things about humility and letting local be local in two Poynter interviews.

This in to Content Bridges from a Washington-based correspondent, preferring anonymity and pondering the zen of national/local in how McClatchy may operated an expanded Washington Bureau.

If the merged DC bureau goes with the McClatchy model, the national and international reporting that was the hallmark of Knight Ridder's DC coverage will suffer.

If it goes with the Knight Ridder model, the local reporting that was  the hallmark of McClatchy's DC bureau will suffer, since many smaller papers likely will opt not to pay for a DC presence.

Isn't that just a perfect reflection of the national/local paradox of online news publishing?

It’s the online news trade’s dirty little secret. Ask most metro news online site managers, and they'll tell you that 50% or more of their traffic comes from outside their metro areas, reaching as high as 80% in some. (Try selling local advertising against those numbers.)

Given those numbers then, managers and editors have done quite a tap dance trying to get the local/national equilibrium right. Their question: how to deeply and uniquely satisfy those with strong local interest and serve national news expectations and needs.

Of course, that's something print editors did for a decades -- but largely without the competition that news aggregators like Yahoo, MSN, Google and Topix now provide.

For online publishers and managers it's a tough paradox:  They like to claim they know their communities best and are the ultimate local news and ad providers, yet their Internet site use patterns are often far less locally oriented than their papers.  Part of that is due to the technology limitations that have crippled online  presentation of the depth and breadth of newspaper event and calendar information.

The solutions will lay in good functionality and good decisions.  Three main ideas:

• Use What You Paid For!: Clearly, news companies need to harness  all the stories and data they already have paid people to produce  and make it Internet-accessible in close to real time.  Make double use of all those legacy costs.
• Let the Readers Decide:  Want a mainly local front? A mainly national one? A hybrid? Provide the tools that let users decide. And don't build themselves; license the best.
• Network: If the awful death of Knight Ridder wasn't sufficient warning (like a friend who dies of a heart attack at 53, after years of knowing about, but not paying attention to heart disease), learn that the Web is all about network, networking and distribution. Don't put a lot of effort into redoing National at all local sites, but create truly state-of-the-art national/global news products that can be networked, with all sharing in the ad money. Martin Nisenholtz (NYT) and Caroline Little (WashPo), maybe it's time again to try syndicating national news products among your newspaper brethren. It's a call Gary Pruitt -- in promoting both profits and quality -- should be happy to take.

 

10 More (Web-Oriented) Questions for Gary Pruitt

These additional questions for Mr. Pruitt,  just in from a web-savvy colleague who prefers anonymity given the tossing and turning of the publishing world. They highlight the kind of smarts McClatchy will now be expected to bring to its web publishing efforts, given its rank as the #2 newspaper company. (It will still have that rank after selling off Knight Ridder's Dirty Dozen, with first bids due tomorrow.)

What questions would you add?

1. Did you think twice before deciding to jettison the online audience (55% of KRD’s total unique users and 36% of pageviews in Feb '06) the “dirty dozen” papers would have generated for you? 

2. What’s your plan for winning more online ad dollars, when the vast majority of those dollars seem to flow to online portals and aggregators with much greater scale of audience? 

3. Do you have a plan for transitioning your company to an era when the bulk of a news publisher’s revenue must be derived from online rather than print media, or do you plan to be out of the industry before that happens? 

4. If a recent college graduate asked you why they should pursue a career in either A) journalism, or B) the business of newspaper publishing, what would you tell them? 

5. Jon Fine reports that according to you, “The growth of craigslist and other almost wholly free classified sites ‘does not mean that [newspapers’ classified] revenues over time will shrink’”. Did you really say that, and if so, can you explain your thinking?

6. Do newspapers need to do a better job of reaching younger audiences? And if so, what’s your plan to achieve this? 

7. If you had to choose, today, between running a company focused exclusively on news generation or one focused exclusively on classified ad revenue, which would you choose, and why? 

8. Do you believe that superior journalism is a direct driver of superior financial performance? If so, can you explain the link between the two? 

9. Which blogs do you read on a regular basis? And which RSS feeds to you subscribe to? 

10. In economically stagnant markets, is the need for quality local journalism greater than, or less than, the need for such journalism in rapidly growing markets? And in either case: who should be responsible for providing that journalism?  

"Saving Journalism and Killing the Press"

Strange things happen when you're under a death sentence. Under the death sentence is where Philly Daily News staffers believe they found themselves following Knight Ridder's sale to McClatchy. Their sometimes neighborly cousins at the Inquirer knew that there'd be no death sentence for them, but rather a strange limbo, as McClatchy immediately put the Inqy (and the Daily News for that matter) back on the block, its future ownership mega-uncertain.

Even before the sale, staffers at the paper and their fellow-traveling readers and journalism-supporting friends began inventing some kind of alternative future.  They've called it NORGs, for the news organization of the 21st century, and I've been a sometimes long-distance participant, joining some new and old friends from my Knight Ridder days.

What is a NORG?  We might say we should have figured that out before this little century began, and maybe things would be a bit better for our industry. But you seize the time you have. The NORG group met today in Philly, inaugurating something called the "The Philadelphia Experiment," as they looked for and debated (nicely) ways out of the current morass.

Long-distance, it sounds like a good day's work. It may be most important as a brave noise in the wilderness, the sound of people trying to find a positive future in an industry largely gone negative in revenue growth and spirit.

Check out Daniel Rubin's immediate account of the day, "Blue Sky on Gray Day" for the flavor and ideas of the day. And inventory the ideas in super-blogger Jeff Jarvis' own account of the day, which includes the notion "saving journalism and killing the press."  Lots of ideas and the comments are flowing. All the work sites well aside the kinds of ferment we've seen over the last week in Jay Rosen's Press Think blog, especially off his post, Twelve Newsapapers in a State of Nature.

Those serious about finding new ways to rebuild the news trade will find the beginnings of many good ideas.

 

Bob Hall, Ron Burkle and Patience

We news guys love a good wild card. Bob Hall is a wild card.

I remember touring Yahoo in 1998. Bob (below) was publisher in Philadelphia and I was vp/editorial at Knight Ridder New Media. Heady, optimistic days, and at KRNM, we were hosting the company's publishers, editors, ad and circ vps, talking Web and visiting companies. (On that Yahoo visit, we met with Jerry Yang, who stood before the group in jeans and sneakers. When Miami Herald publisher Dave Lawrence asked, "Jerry, are you interested in getting into the classified business?" Jerry looked down at his feet and said, "That's not our business." But I digress.)

During our Yahoo visit, we knew we were supposed to call into a KR concall, led by KR CEO Tony Ridder. We found a conference room there, about a minute into the call. ".....and that's why we're moving Corporate from Miami," Tony said. Bob and I looked at each other. I pointed to him and said "you're [Philly] getting him, and he pointed to me and said, "No, you [San Jose] are." Of course, he was right.

That move to San Jose and not Philly probably prolonged Hall's KR tenure, which ended in 2003.

The re-emergence of feisty Bob Hall, feisty former Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News publisher, certainly tosses a curious wild card into the auctioning off of the Dirty Dozen. Those are the 12 papers, including the Inqy, the DN, the Mercury News and the Pioneer Press in Saint Paul that McClatchy put back on the block a day after agreeing on terms to buy Knight Ridder.

All totaled, those 12 papers represent 43% of Knight Ridder's current revenue. Maybe more to the point, going forward, they represent 55% of KRD’s total unique users and 36% of pageviews (Feb. '06).

Hall's hiring by the Yucaipa/Newspaper Guild group, calling itself Value Plus for now, is significant. He's well and widely regarded in the industry, having run well one of its biggest operations until his 2003 retirement. He made a name running good papers and innovatively trying to reach out to some new markets, adding niche offerings. In retiring, it became clear he'd had enough skirmishes with KR Corporate. He'd stared down Corporate several times, including one legendary set-to in which he said, basically "let me run my business." Corporate did, for a while.

So he is of the newspaper trade, part of the brotherhood to which Gary Pruitt (and Dean Singleton) belong. Hall had his share of union fights, but now he's retained as a "senior adviser" in the purchase bid. That tells the industry something. Bob Hall + Ron Burkle's billions through Yucaipa + the Guild and CWA unions. Now that's a mix that even the colorful Dean Singleton can't match.

In the release on Hall's hiring, Value Plus noted that the investors would show the patience needed in the current challenged and challenging newspaper environment. That's good, and not unlike what we're seeing said by the companies wise and lucky enough to have two classes of stock, like the Times, Dow Jones, the Post -- and of expanded significance -- McClatchy.

Patience is good. Much better than panic.

What I don't see in the Value Plus proposal yet -- and I'm willing to be patient and give them time -- is a sense that the newspaper trade as it is now practiced is unsustainable over the longer term. I don't see the understanding that the Internet revolution means new business models that need to be innovated very quickly -- and probably impatiently -- if the journalistic trade we car about is to prosper. It's not the papers that need saving -- it's the journalism, which will be largely electronically distributed sooner than later. That means more change and lots of it -- and challenging the skills sets of those unionized workers backing Value Plus. It's a tough conundrum, but one that should at least be acknowledged as the first round of the bidding process closes Tuesday.

Ah, the zen of patience.

 

10 Questions for Gary Pruitt

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt has his head and hands full buying and sellng papers, as he figures out what it means to be the country's second-biggest newspaper company. A few questions for him as he moves forward (and 10 additional very web-specific ones added):

1. Was it coincidence that 8 of the 12 KR properties you immediately put on the sales block were Newspaper Guild operations, making your chances of achieving significant cost savings more difficult? 

2. Were  you surprised that Tony Ridder was surprised that you were going to re-sell 12 of his papers, including his hometown Merc? 

3. Is the sale of the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times to Dean Singleton’s Media News all-but-a-done-deal, as many suspect?

4. If you succeed in taking K’s stake in the T(ribune) K(nightrider) G(annett) investments in Career Builder and Classified Ventures, will you push to get some of McClatchy’s local market penetration tricks of the trades adopted? 

5. Will you push TMG (TGM?) for new collective investments, for instance, in buying an ad matching company, like Quigo or Context Web, so that the news industry’s reliance on Google and Yahoo for paid search/contextual revenue can be reduced? 

6. Will you make McClatchy more of a player overall in the ventures game, looking for technologies, lead gen companies and other complements to the online businesses? 

7. Can you figure out a more strategic way to purpose TKG’s 75% stake in Topix to advantage local search and traffic re-circulation on local newspaper sites? 

8. Can you convince a skeptical Wall Street, which is punishing your purchase daily, that you’ll be getting better-than-expected prices for the Dirty Dozen, defraying the cost of the deal? 

    9 .  Will you give the Yucaipa/Guild bid a wide open shot?

10. How likely are PCM, Harris and Southeastern to stick with the deal if the McClatchy share price keeps dropping, reducing the “collar-less” purchase price below 62 or 63?

Don't-Miss Links to Pressing Futures

Sometimes the news comes at us too quickly.  After a weekend of Florida baseball (watch out for the Twins and Justin Morneau), here's a catch-up of recent links worth stopping and paying attention to:

In Philly, they always do things a little differently and don't take slights lightly.  People in and around the two dailies, the Inquirer and the Daily News, knew that they might me in for more trouble when Knight Ridder put itself for sale in November. When McClatchy bought and then announced it was selling 12 of its new children, including the Philadelphia papers, asap, the news got worse.

The Inquirer, once the flagship Pulitzer winner of KR, has sustained ongoing newsroom cuts. Its cousin, the sprightly, tenacious Daily News tab not only has sustained its own cuts and bruises, but has always seemed one step away from the graveyard.  Marginally profitable at best, its survival has been based on the shaky proposition that it was better for KR to own its own competition (to the Inquirer) than have a real competitor shake things up. Now that protection appears lost.

Will Bunch (with the brother-can-you-spare-a-dime cup) , a Daily News columnist and blogger, is one of many in Philly who hasn't given up hope, even in a time of  corporate chessboard games and multiple newspaper struggles. His optimism about the new kinds of journalism that can be created and paid for is a breath of fresh air. It led to a new group and now an unconference, trying to find force light into the darkness.  Check out the candle.

In San Jose, Mercury News staffers felt similarly stunned by being placed back on the sales block. There, given the culture, a Save the Merc community staff/group community group is forming and trying to find its legs.

Pertinent to these discussions of, in part, do-it-ourselves media (DIO?) is how media distribution now works. We're in this weird 1.5 world in which old systems and old money is challenged, and new systems and new money are being created, but oh-so-fitfully. To that end and others, anyone who wants to get the word out -- their own, or their communities, or even think about what news distribution broadly means today -- should check out David Scott's new ebook. David is a friend, who taught me a bit about the joys of Typepad (should have gotten a commission, for enabling this blog).  The new free download ebook  lays out well the new rules of the p.r. game, giving us all some practical tips about how to work the new distribution systems and cycles.

Jay Rosen has stamina. He is a  NYU journalism prof and friend, who helped us design and implement some print public journalism projects at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press (yes, too on the chopping block anew) in the '90s. Public journalism predated the web, engaging the community through forums, letters-to-the-editor, etc around such issues as real public safety and intergenerational responsibility.  Jay's PressThink blog is always worth checking in on, delving deeply into the press/democracy/citizen involvement issues/survival of real reporting issues that underlay this all. He recently released a study of newspaper-mediated blogging, well-worth studying.  How newspapers and other media like NPR come to grips with citizen-generated content will determine much of the next stage. It's what I've called the Blews, the merging of blogs and news in all kinds of intriguing ways.

Lee Rainie's initiative on the Internet and American life has a knack for asking so many of the right questions. You can access its  reports for free (thanks to the legacy Big Oil money that funded Pew). One of my favorite recent tidbits from Deborah Fallows' Internet usage report: "Nearly a third of Internet users go online on a typical day for no particular reason, just for fun or to pass the time."  Check out the wealth of what's available, and get the latest scoop on Internet dating from its most recent report. Or for you save-the-press types,  check out just-out research from Pew Research overall on the challenged state of news media, and especially of  deep reporting.

 

Say It Ain't So: Tony Ridder's Astounding Surprise

On both Friday and Sunday mornings, fans of journalism awoke happy. Knight Ridder, we thought, had been sold to McClatchy, the fairest-haired of its suitors, the one whose CEO is mindful to highlight "community", "service" and "reporting" in his talks and interviews. 

After all, we had worried for months, since PCM dispatched KR to limbo in November. The Internet and Wall Street be damned, were we going to lose our precious hometown papers? We knew that in KnightRidderLand, as in Lake Wobegon, all the papers are above average.

Monday, though, we awakened again to find that our happiness was premature. Gary Pruitt made good on his previous pledges to shareholders:  I'll keep only good-margin properties in high-growth markets.

He told everyone who would listen that 12 of his new properties would be put immediately on the block. Those properties included the Saint Paul Pioneer Press , which we expected, given anti-trust concerns arising from McClatchy's ownership of the Star Tribune in the Twin Cities, there living the rumor that a federal Anti-Trust Division, last heard from in the last century, still exists.

The list though also included  the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Akron Beacon  Journal and surprising 3 KR California papers, including the Mercury News in San Jose, and papers in Contra Costa and Monterey. Surely, we all thought, Gary Pruitt was building an impressive California and West Coast base, with seven papers in the once-and-future Golden State and at least 4 in Washington. But no. Pruitt said the Merc didn't meet his oft-stated criteria, and once it was outside the fold, so were its Bay Area sister papers.

Shock. Dismay. Renewed angst. We expect that reaction from fans of journalism.

We didn't expect it from the man who was at the table doing the deal with Gary Pruitt: Tony Ridder.

Tony told his hometown paper -- the paper he had built as publisher in the '80s from a non-player into one of the top 10 in the nation --  that he was, well, shocked, dismayed and filled with as much angst as a Ridder is allowed.

"I was just stunned when I heard they were selling San Jose and Contra Costa, and Monterey, too.....`I was feeling pretty good, and then, out of the blue, selling 12 of the papers."

Wait a minute. You were stunned?

You could be taken aback. Resigned. Despondent. Inclined to spend your own money to keep the paper.

But how could you be stunned? Your name is on the company. You hired you the investment bankers. You reviewed the bids. Gary Pruitt is in the fraternity.

Tony's explanation is that weeks before the bids came in on March 9, he'd been told that McClatchy was only looking at selling at most 2 or 3 of the papers. It was only on March 9, in New York, as the final bids came in did Tony learn from Goldman Sachs that McClatchy intended to sell 12 papers, including the Merc. He says he tried to get the Merc and Contra Costa back into the McClatchy fold but was rebuffed. And of course, it was then too late. It was all over but the crying, the counting of severance and waiting for the Dirty Dozen to show up on eBay .

I have no doubt that Tony is anguished and surprised. But isn't this the fit epitaph for a once-great company, now in the throes of dismemberment, a company that has had such inability to sweat the details and execute:

                                        TOO
                                      LITTLE
                                        TOO
                                       LATE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knight Ridder's Own March Madness

Absolutely inspired hilarity off the odd turn-of-events of savior McClatchy dispatching the Philadelphia dailies and most of KR's northern properties.

Check out the Philly March Madness brackets from Will Bunch of the Philly Daily News.  For the moment, playing along is the best tonic.

Gary Pruitt: The Remodeler's Dilemma

Gary Pruitt's not the kind of guy to have buyer's remorse. And why should he? Astoundingly, the market responded to his risk-taking purchase of Knight Ridder by bidding up the McClatchy share price. That's a vote of confidence in Pruitt, believing he can wring more value out of the beleaguered Knight Ridder assets than could Tony Ridder.

Still, the size of the, uh, opportunity sitting before McClatchy CEO Pruitt is an outsized one. It's as if he put a classified ad in his flagship Sacramento Bee:

No monster house builders welcome. Owner of cozy 2/1 cottage, solid foundation, well-maintained seeks contractor for major add-on. Goal: 5/4, with all modern amenities (Internet capable throughout), energy-efficient, all work to be done in 180 days.

Think of it. Pruitt needs to remodel the McClatchy house while going to work every day, not missing a beat with his ongoing business. Easier said than done.

Remember the last big newspaper buy, when Tribune bought the Times Mirror in 2000. That deal was heralded as one that would propel Tribune into the front ranks of newspapering and achieve great synergies.  Tribune got big indeed, but less nimble, and has spent years massaging the integration of its assets. Its various attempts to bring L.A. Times management into the fold, to wring out redundant costs and to make more efficient use of company assets have been well-documented. It's been tough, underwhelming in its impacts, and most importantly, has taken way too much time.

Time is the key.

It's not as if Gary Pruitt's new house is in a prosperous, unhurried part of town. It's in a transitional neighborhood, with new neighbors moving in and out rapidly, as the Internet produces would-be partners and competitors daily. Some rogues in fact drive by and are taking potshots through the windows.  What seemed like popguns several years ago may seem like bazookas within the next couple of years.

The house itself has seemed solid enough. But those pipes of revenue have developed odd blockages here and there, and the circulation pipeline no longer responds to a good shot of sales pressure Drano.

Then there's the question of which rooms to rent, or maybe condo-ize, as evidenced by remodeler Pruitt's immediate announcement that 12 of the newly purchased papers -- including all the unionized ones, btw -- will go back on the block.

First matter of business for the remodel: finding the right subs. How solid is Pruitt's crew, and who will he take on from Knight Ridder and Knight Ridder Digital as he drives the new business from Sacramento? That'll be the first task ahead as he formally closes the deal.