Think outside the box? No. Smash the box.
Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest news chain, has retained an investment bank to start the bidding after its largest shareholder pressured the company to sell itself or sell off papers to boost its stock price.
I said at the time that the likeliest outcome from a journalistic standpoint would be enormous damage to the quality of news coverage in the 31 communities served by Knight Ridder papers (Philadelphia has two).
I still think that. But Jay "Pressthink" Rosen, taking time from finishing a book to guest-post over at Arianna Huffington's group blog, says it doesn't have to be that way:
Here is my own solution: a community buyback plan, explained in these eleven points. I am told it's impossible and will never happen. And that's probably true. But no one has any better ideas, so here goes...* Knight-Ridder announces that rather than sell to another big company or get bought, it has another plan: to break itself up. It will sell all 32 newspapers it owns to local buyers who will pay a premium for the opportunity to own the local daily. If no such buyers are found to exist, there is no transaction. The plan is called the Main Street Strategy to distinguish it from Wall Street thinking.
* The goal of the plan is to maximize shareholder value. That means a total price equal to or better than what shareholders could be expected to realize from any of the options commonly talked about today in the industry and the press: takeover by another newspaper company, purchase by a private equity firm, or cutting quality further in order to halt the erosion in market share (the current strategy.) A second goal is to improve the probability that quality journalism will happen in the future in the 31 towns where Knight-Ridder operates newspapers.
He further elaborates on this plan in the nine remaining points. (Mark Fitzgerald, editor-at-large for the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, comments on the plan here.)
The truth? This isn't the way the business of newspapers normally works. But it would come closer to maximizing shareholder value than the status quo does, and it might even outperform the "normal" business transactions likely being envisioned by KR and its largest shareholders. Besides, what has "normal" gotten us except declining circulation, declining quality and a whole bunch of lost jobs?
If you have friends in Charlotte, Columbia or Myrtle Beach who care about quality local journalism and have some capital to invest, you might want to send them a link to Rosen's post. Even if Rosen's plan has zero chance of being implemented, I think it's long overdue that we had a national conversation about the benefits and costs of quality local journalism. The 31 Knight Ridder communities seem as good a group of places as any to start.
UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis offers a variation on Jay's plan here. While "tougher" from a business standpoint than the Rosen plan, it strikes me as even less likely to take place. And given that I give the Rosen plan roughly zero percent chance of taking place, that's saying something.
