The parasites are holding on to its assets of the "media conglomerate" while the Nation assets, highways, ports, factories ect ect are been auction like a garage sale to keep the dollar afloat.Or by going to a pawn shop to make monthly payments on the house.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/business/media/13cnd-knight.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=4c6337957501d18e&hp&ex=1142312400&partner=homepage

While the Knight Ridder papers are profitable, some are more troubled than others and may be a drag on McClatchy's bottom line. Analysts speculate that the company could shut down The Philadelphia Daily News and possibly sell The Inquirer, since the business climate in Philadelphia is sluggish and the papers face tough competition from a ring of suburban dailies. On the other hand, they say, The Inquirer generates a lot of cash, something McClatchy will need as it goes into debt to pay for Knight Ridder.

"I would hope that McClatchy would be able to understand the value of having two competing newspapers in one city and would keep the tabloid alive," said Theresa Conroy, who has been a reporter for The Daily News for 11 years. "But it seems that in most of the scenarios that all the analysts talked about, no matter who bought us, they were going to close The Daily News."

Analysts have also suggested that McClatchy may sell Knight Ridder's St. Paul Pioneer Press. McClatchy already owns The Star Tribune in adjacent Minneapolis and could face an antitrust challenge if it kept the St. Paul paper. The Pioneer Press's profit margin is just 10 percent, relatively low for the industry, and selling it would also help McClatchy raise money to pay for the deal.

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Newspaper Chain Agrees to a Sale for $4.5 Billion

Knight Ridder, the second-largest newspaper company in the United States, has agreed to sell itself for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock to the McClatchy Company, a publisher half its size, the two companies announced today.

The combined company plans to sell 12 Knight-Ridder papers, including both its papers in Philadelphia, the Inquirer and the Daily News, along with The San Jose Mercury News, according to the announcement.

"These are terrific publications but simply do not fit with our long- standing acquisition and operating strategies," Gary Pruitt, McClatchy's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

Mr. Pruitt said the company would hang on to some of the other Knight-Ridder papers in "high-growth markets," including The Miami Herald, The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram and The Charlotte Observer. He said the expanded company would have 32 daily papers with a combined daily circulation of 3.2 million.

The deal comes as the newspaper industry is gripped by uncertainty. Readers have begun to drift away from printed newspapers as their Web sites have experienced sharp gains in use.

The sale may help assuage some investors who are nervous about the values of newspaper companies, however, because Knight Ridder commanded a premium of about 25 percent for its shares from the time it put itself up for sale in November under pressure from shareholders who were unhappy with performance of its stock.

Still, McClatchy, which is based in Sacramento and publishes The Sacramento Bee and The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, among others, was the only major newspaper company to submit a final bid for Knight Ridder, publisher of 32 daily newspapers.

While Knight Ridder attracted interest from some big publishers, including Gannett, the largest chain in the United States, most major newspaper companies passed on the auction entirely, underscoring just how unsettled the biggest players are about their own business.

Mr. Pruitt today called the deal "a vote of confidence in the newspaper industry."

Under the terms of the deal, McClatchy agreed to pay about $67 a share in cash and stock for Knight Ridder, these people said. About 60 percent of the payment will be in cash, while the rest will be in McClatchy shares.

On Friday, Knight Ridder's shares rose 4 percent in anticipation that a deal would be reached over the weekend. But those shares had been trading at about $53 a share when Bruce Sherman, a Knight Ridder shareholder, went public with his efforts to put pressure on the company to put itself up for sale.

Because Knight Ridder is so much larger than McClatchy, the merger is likely to create some upheaval for both companies, both through sales of papers and through further cost-control measures in its own newsrooms to help finance the deal.

The other papers Mr. Pruitt said he planned to sell were The Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio, The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader in Pennsylvania, The Aberdeen American News in South Dakota, The Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota, the Ft. Wayne News-Sentinel in Indiana, The Contra-Costa Times and The Monterey Herald in California and The Duluth News-Tribune in Minnesota.

In addition, the St. Paul Pioneer Press will be sold because of anticipated anti-trust concerns, since McClatchy already owns the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Tony Ridder, Knight-Ridder's chairman and chief executive, said in the announcement that "the joining of so many Knight-Ridder newspapers under McClatchy's banner will enable them to continue to flourish in an environment of excellence and integrity."

He called the sale an "excellent outcome for investors and concludes a period of considerable uncertainty" for employees," although he acknowledged that the uncertainty would continue for workers at the papers to be sold.

Knight Ridder, based in San Jose, Calif., has almost three times as many dailies as the 12 owned by McClatchy. Knight Ridder's $3 billion in revenue for 2005 was more than twice McClatchy's $1.2 billion.

The company put itself up for sale partly at the urging of Mr. Sherman, a portfolio manager who runs Private Capital Management, a subsidiary of the brokerage firm Legg Mason. ">Legg Mason.

"McClatchy is a dolphin swallowing a small whale," said Chuck Richard, an analyst at Outsell Inc., a research firm for the information industry.

Still, the prospect of a McClatchy takeover may bring some relief within Knight Ridder, where some had feared a takeover by investors who had little newspaper experience and were likely to strip down the properties and eventually sell them off.

"I think most everyone in the newsroom has a great deal of respect for McClatchy and the papers it runs," said Michael Cassidy, a columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, who has worked at the paper for the past 20 years. "Given the various scenarios, including the private equity firms that were involved in the bidding, McClatchy would be a newsroom favorite."