"Hindenberg Agrees to Rescue Titanic...Film at 11"

I'm not a genius. And although I have worked many years for McClatchy Newspaper’s Sacramento paper, The Bee, I am also no expert on the newspaper business. (I should have paid closer attention, I know…)Call me a cynic, but I don't think the splashing of the sinking Knight Ridder will be enough to put out the flames of McClatchy's fiery plummet.Didn’t anyone tell Gary Pruitt that when someone is getting electrocuted, you are not supposed to not grab them?

This is like Bugs and Daffy falling off a cliff, then climbing atop one and other to avoid hitting the ground first.Look, I may end up eating crow on this (I do that a lot) but unconfirmed rumor has it that Q1 of '06 may be the first year in the past 20 McClatchy will not post growth in circulation.

And despite 20 years of circulation improvement, circulation has not kept pace with market growth and the true story of market share and penetration is a sad one for the newspaper business. Add to this a 20% loss, year over last, for McClatchy’s Automotive advertising and an almost certainly lost game in recruitment, real estate and private party classified print revenue and you see that prospects for plugging the leak seems dismal.The editorial product continues to be less and less compelling, commoditized and simply out of date with virtually every A-section article on my porch this morning consisting of overly expanded, overly-politicized versions of yesterday’s breaking news found online and last nights TV.Now at less than half the size of Knight Ridder, they are going to make profitable what insiders there could not?

MAYBE.

If the goal here is to use this to springboard into Internet stardom, they may be able to pull this off.

The largest percentage profit growth for many newspapers these days are not being had in the newsprint, they are in the online and direct mail and insert business.Now, suddenly McClatchy is a one stop shop offering access to 44 markets. That is to say one buy placed with one company for 44 markets worth of direct mail, local Internet and FSI/Inserts. (Even newspaper Ads, if people are still buying these buy the time the dust settles) That could do a lot to help sagging national Ad revenues.

HOWEVER - these are still newspaper companies. Ask them.They are NOT in the "getting the news YOU want to you quickly and effectively" business, they are in the newspaper business and the rest of the channels are often reluctantly offered, understaffed and regarded as scary, threatening pockets of confusion and internal nuisance.Middle managers are still compensated in silos and say “yes, yes, yes” on the surface and then go back to selling dead trees to earn more dead presidents. (Printed on more dead trees...hmmmm. Conspiracy? YOU decide.)

Until the upper management starts looking, thinking and acting more like the younger demographic groups they so desperately crave attention from (The same groups who ignore their print product almost completely) and less like cigar chomping Oldsmobile executives from the wood paneled glory days of 1975, all of the increased market share, and distribution gained in a move like this will just end up more corporate refuse to be buried later.

Come on Gary, prove us wrong.

Maybe your vision of being “the last dinosaur standing” will come true and the ice age won't come after all! Maybe.