Every time I hear about the sale of Knight Ridder, two things happen. One, I sort of chuckle at the failure of the company as a whole thanks to the mindset of management. And the second thing that happens is that I cannot help but think what a shame it has been to see such a powerful company, and a lot of their employees, go out the way they did.
When I worked at the web operations branch of Knight Ridder, Knight Ridder Digital I met a lot of great KR employees, a handful of them even worked in my building! I really did have the privilege to administer/construct/maintain over 100 blogs, most for some really great people. And when I think of all of these people in these uncertain times, even I get a little angered at how things went down.
But even having said that, this wasn’t really unexpected. Even before the largest shareholders of KR demanded a change, this company just didn’t know what to do in these turbulent times for the media. This sale is probably a result of KR’s inactions and poor decision-making.
Let’s face it; KR/D didn’t have the best decision making track record. I’ll just refresh everyone’s memory with the $6.3 Million Tribe.net partnership that went nowhere and the use of city & regional domain names instead of their papers. BayArea.com branding has come and gone. To get a sense as to what type of mind set permeated Knight Ridder/Digital, you should just take a look at an interview PaidContent.org did with Hillary Schneider SVP at the time of KRD had to say about those damn user registrations;
Q: KR started a registration initiative for its sites about a year ago. How has this worked for KR, and how do you measure the results?
A: Gauging the results is fairly straight-forward - have the number of registrants increased or not? KR benefits from having registered users, because it enhances the company’s ability to have a dialogue with its local viewers and then offer those viewers content that they are interested in reading at a much greater frequency. Since we started registration, we have seen traffic increase very nicely to our local sites.
Did you catch it? KR benefits from having registered users. First and foremost; Knight Ridder. Not the advertisers, and especially NOT the users or subscribers. Knight. Ridder. That is where the problems begin. That thinking is what sets you on the wrong path.
But at least there were the blogs. Right? Wrong. I can’t say the blogs failed, because there was so much growth. At the same time I can’t say of lot of them succeeded either. Sadly a lot of them just couldn’t meet an unexpected amount of requirements, all thanks to the insane costs involved, and were cut out of the picture. Having to deal with these plainly stupid costs was unfair to them, but that is how KR/D operated; all about the money (it has even been said that KRD only came about because Knight Ridder wanted to spin off a branch for an IPO - I think that sums it up all right there). What I can say about the KR blogs is this; they could have been 20-100 times better. The bloggers wanted them to be better, the local market wanted them to be better, I wanted them to be better. But we had no pull, no say, no input. One person did, however. One person over many, a many who were more experienced and considerably more savy in this field, but were ignored. This was certainly the rule and nowhere close to being the exception. That was Knight Ridder.
(Looks like the time has come; so long and thanks for all the fish; Aaron Barnhart, Greg Reeves, Suzanne Tobias, Bob Henry, Bob Heisse, Rich Matheison, Jon Fortt, Ari Soglin, Kathy Vetter, Jim Arnold, Dan Rubin, Chris Norman, Glenda Bautista, Jimmy Mass, Alan Quinonez, Stan Kadani, and Robert Torres.)
To be honest, it was quite obvious early on that KR/D had no serious intention of wanting success in the blog portion of internet communication. But I had a hard time swallowing the fact the people in charge attended irrelevent conferences like one on search engine optimization rather than something like Blog Business Summit or even Web 2.0. My co-worker Jeremiah said it best, “that’s going in the wrong direction”. The wrong direction to the rest of us who know, but the RIGHT direction for those folks in the management. And we now see where that thinking got them.
Update [3-23-06]:
PressThink links over here in the post Twelve Newspapers in a State of Nature where I find this interesting tidbit on McClatchy Interactive;
Describing what he characterized as McClatchy’s approach to corporate oversight, he [Christian Hendricks, McClatchy VP who heads the company's online sites] said: “Corporate doesn’t send dictates down the pipeline telling people how to run things. We have a discussion and set broad parameters. We tell people where the fences are, what the long-term strategies are in terms of readership and financial goals.”
He added: “If (the local online managers) operate outside those fences, we don’t shoot them. We have a discussion about whether we should move the fences or whether they should get back inside … We really believe that the people at the local sites are the ones who should be talking to their markets and making decisions.”
See? Someone gets it. Actually, a whole company gets it. That is the complete opposite of Knight Ridder Digital, where they made it seem as if the local sites had no clue, when they really had the best understanding of anyone. If any of my former co-workers at Knight Ridder Digital are brought over to McClatchy when the deal is closed, and appreciate McClatchy Interactive’s thinking, they should consider themselves very lucky.
Update #2 [3-23-06]: Ouch! But still funny.
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