I filed a rather flippant post a few days ago about the boss man of McClatchy, the company that is about to buy Knight Ridder (which owns The State). Respectful, of course, but flippant.

Well, let’s get serious for a minute. I was much pleased with this piece in The Wall Street Journal the other day. There’s definitely more to this young man than an obsession with The Ramones. Note that I say "young man" not merely because he’s four years younger than I, but because he looks much younger than that. One of my colleagues (whom I will not name) made a passing reference the other day to "our new 12-year-old boss." That’s a bit of an exaggeration, of course. Mr. Pruitt looks, I would say, thirtyish — which to me is still a kid — but everyone knew to whom the description was meant to refer.

But if he is a kid, he’s a kid with potential. I’ll have to keep my eye on this young man; I have high hopes for him. And yes, I’m saying that because he seems to think about the future of newspapers in much the same way I do. That makes him a smart guy, right?

In case you have trouble linking to the piece, what with the WSJ being all regulation about wanting everybody to be a subscriber, I’ll explain that I’m referring to an op-ed by Mr. Pruitt in the March 16 edition headlined, "Brave News World." Here’s the beginning of it:

Last year, the world celebrated the 400th birthday of the newspaper. Those of us in the business also recognized it as the 399th anniversary of the first prediction of our demise. Speaking as someone whose company is writing a $6.5 billion check to triple its newspaper holdings, I beg to differ.

To many, ink spread across newsprint pages seems old-fashioned and destined to disappear. This conventional wisdom has become so pervasive that you can buy the nation’s second-largest newspaper group, Knight-Ridder, for a price that would have seemed an unimaginable bargain only a few years ago. But while that kind of thinking might be good for our company — we were the buyer, after all — it’s wrong. The fact is, newspapers are still among the best media businesses — and the most important.

He goes on to explain that while readership has declined, it’s still healthy. And while everybody touts the power of TV, he presents some interesting stats to put that into perspective. Here’s one illustration I thought was revealing:

When the Steelers faced off against the Seahawks in SuperBowl XL last
month, 90.7 million people turned in, television’s best day of the
year. But on that Sunday — indeed, on an average Sunday in 2004-2005
— about 124 million people read the Sunday newspaper. Look at it this
way: We won Super Sunday, 12-9.

That may seem an odd comparison: One TV network versus all the papers in the country. But think about it — newspapers are community businesses, not national businesses (with the freakish exception of McPaper, aka USAToday). The local stations are our competition, not the overall network. And we routinely beat those local stations like a drum. So think of his illustration as being about every network affiliate vs. its community newspaper. The papers won in a walk, in terms of market share that day. And there’s no question we beat them in news coverage, every day.

I’ll finish with this excerpt, which addresses the canard that we are being driven out of business by the Web:

While it may seem counterintuitive to suppose that a
company founded before the advent of electric lights would be a media
leader in the age of blogs, podcasts and text messaging, that’s exactly
what has happened. We certainly have competition from Google and
others. But in each of the communities where we compete, almost every
newspaper has the largest news staff, largest sales force, biggest
audience and greatest share of advertising in its market. Whether it’s
on the Internet or off the presses, we are capturing that business.

Adding the unduplicated reach of newspaper Web sites
to newspaper readership shows that, far from shrinking, our audiences
are growing steadily. Simply put, more people want our products today
than wanted them yesterday; this is hardly the profile of a dying
industry. But of course our products have changed as we have all been
forced to adapt. Today’s daily newspaper is the engine driving a
multimedia company that includes popular Web sites, foreign language
publications, direct marketing initiatives and much more. Replacing the
notion of "readers" with "audiences," we’re fast becoming
multi-platform, 24/7 news companies — and it’s working.

Just in case the WSJ gets ticked about my excerpting their material, let me finish by saying that WSJ.com is a fine product, which I would recommend to my friends — but only if they are already seven-day subscribers to The State. If they aren’t, they have no way of knowing what’s going on in their communities. And something they don’t know about on their own street is a whole lot more likely to jump up and bite them where it hurts than something happening in New York or Washington.

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