Knight-Ridder On the Block

David Card | November 15, 2005, 07:38 PM

Slate's Daniel Gross asks, Why would anyone want to buy Knight-Ridder? His analysis is largely correct, as far as it goes. However, he left out several other potential partners: local TV station holding companies, Yellow Pages/directories companies, and radio station holding companies, all of which are based on local ad revenues.

For all the financial spin of the article, Gross seems to think media companies are about content. They're not -- they're about marrying an audience with advertisers. (I'm exaggerating to make a point, of course.)

I suppose I could conceive of some mergers across those spaces. Maybe. But there are regulatory hurdles, and similar lack of interest in slow-growth businesses. There are few economies of scale, but there is the potential of what Landmark Communications used to call "in-market scale". That is, the power of owning multiple information/news/ad outlets in a single market. (Landmark has in-market scale in Las Vegas and Nashville; it has traditional scale in its Weather Channel business, and its part-owned Trader Publishing business.)

I don't think Landmark equated in-market scale solely with the ability to gouge advertisers. There's potentially great power in reaching an audience across multiple channels. Landmark is a very smart company, by the way, and often overlooked.