McClatchy buys Knight Ridder: thumbs up

Landed in Austin at midnight for four days at the South by Southwest Interactive and Music festivals. Just checked into the Homestead hotel across the river from the convention center, jacking in through cheap but shitty wi-fi. Blogging will be light this week.

I'm very happy to see the news that my former employer, McClatchy Newspapers, has purchased the much larger Knight Ridder newspaper chain -- including my current hometown paper, the San Jose Mercury News -- for $4.5 billion, as the San Jose Mercury News and NY Times report.

It's good news for anyone who cares about journalism. While McClatchy has sacrificed some quality over the years in cost-cutting bids to please Wall Street, it's a company that still cares deeply about journalism, unlike some other potential bidders, which could have gutted Knight Ridder's staff and turning its local newspaper monopolies into pure money-printing machines. (Neither are hurting financially. McClatchy's operating profit margin was 22.8 percent last year, compared with Knight Ridder's 16.4 percent.)

And a NY Times sidebar: Scant Bidding for Knight Ridder Tells Story of Decline ... for newspapers in general.