After picking their jaws up from the floor, staffs at both the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press began analyzing and contemplating what Par Ridder leaving the latter to publish the former really means. Ridder is the 38 year-old scion of the once renown newspaper family. A family whose dance with Wall St. devils proved fatal, to many of their employees, if not to them.
Knight-Ridder’s bungle led, first, to the evisceration in terms of staffing and quality of its’ papers across the country, including the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In the Twin Cities it led to a sale last spring of the Pioneer Press to Star Tribune owner McClatchy to satisfy private equity investors. That move was followed by another sale of the Pioneer Press, this to cutthroat media owner, MediaNews. What significant publishing experience the young Mr. Ridder has gained in his short career came from overseeing the execution of rigorous downsizing in St. Paul. (Ridder was quoted only last week telling Pioneer Press employees they’d be better off without a union.) He will bring that expertise to Minneapolis.
Ridder was introduced at a hastily-called 9:15 AM meeting, (a company-wide e-mail went out at 8:29 AM, almost as though someone preferred most reporter-types were NOT on hand for the Ridder-era curtain-raising). His introduction coincides with the first day of Avista Capital Partner’s ownership of the Star Tribune, following McClatchy’s startling Dec. 26 fire-sale of the paper to avoid capital gains tax penalties.
Ridder’s tenure at the Pioneer Press, overseeing draconian cutbacks in staffing and depth of coverage, is not the sort of thing that should reassur either Star Tribune newsroom employees or, if it cares, the community at large. A brief Q&A at the early morning introduction apparently did not get into specifics of the Avista game plan, which has most of the staff on edge, presuming cutbacks and lay-offs a la what Ridder supervised at the Pioneer Press.
Pioneer Press staffers were in a different state of shock. Ridder may have been regarded as a rich kid in a largely empty suit, but no one I talked with ever considered he’d leave … for the Star Tribune. While the Pioneer Press “playbook” may be a thin, rudimentary text these days, Avista may — “may”, I say — see an advantage in having a guy who knows how all the revenue deals are managed on board their ship, if getting ruthless and sinking the Pioneer Press once and for all is part of their profit-making strategy.
More to follow.
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