Good Knight, and Good Luck

The mainstream business media have been full of stories about the forced sale of the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers to McClatchy, and the latter's subsequent decision to sell off twelve of K-R's less profitable titles. So what's missing? Any sense of what's at stake. Despite predictions that the merger of K-R's constituent papers' Washington bureaus into one super-bureau would be bad for the news coverage of those papers, the K-R Washington bureau has been unparalleled in sane, unflinching, fact-based coverage of Iraq and other major stories. You won't read about that in the Times or Washington Post or LAT coverage of the K-R sale, forced by a profit-seeking missile at a hedge fund. You can read about it here.