Man Sues To Block Sale Of San Jose Mercury News (and others)

Summary from KGO-TV report:

After buying Knight Ridder, the McClatchy company (owner of the Sacramento Bee) has offered to sell 3 northern California papers, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, and Monterey Herald,  to a group that owns many other small papers in the area.

A San Fransisco real estate developer, Clint Reilly, is suing to stop the sale to a consortium (my definition) of 4 groups with news media interests. (Both current reports dated Friday July 14, 2006 say the suit would be filed Friday afternoon. 

Reilly  also sued in 2000 to stop the sale of the the San Fransisco Chronicle.  (A current KARE11 reports that was to the Hearst Corporation because it already owned the San Francisco Examiner.)

KARE11 also notes:

 A judge ultimately rejected Reilly's claims that the sale created a monopoly for Hearst, which already owned the rival San Francisco Examiner. But the litigation delayed and complicated the deal.

But a March 17, 2000 report at SFGate (the online site of the San Fransisco Chronicle) says:

San Francisco will remain a two-newspaper town after all.

The afternoon San Francisco Examiner has been acquired by the owners of the San Francisco Independent, a free-circulation newspaper published twice a week by San Francisco's Fang family.

The sale clears the way for the Examiner's owner, the New York-based Hearst Corp., to buy the larger morning paper, the Chronicle, by satisfying antitrust concerns.

Unfortunately,  KARE11 (KABC Minneapolis) didn't realize the Mr. Reilly's suit was obviously not a failure as it prevented a monopoly from forming over the news in SF and that the outcome of the trial was possibly changed because of the sale of the Examiner and that KGO-TV (KABC San Fransico, Oakland, San Jose)  didn't attempt to cover the specifics of the previous case at all.   (I guess we shouldn't say anything about Mickey Mouse news reporting here, but we will. Check out Media Matter for America -- link at right-- for examples of how the rest of the self congratutalory mainstream news services poorly serve Americans.)

To continue KARE11 reports:

William Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group Inc. already owns 22 newspapers in Northern California. Besides the Tribune, they include the Marin Independent Journal, The Vacaville Reporter and others with a combined readership of more than 70,000. It is that concentration of publishing power that Reilly's suit seeks to stop, [his lawyer Joseph A.] Alioto said.

Also named in the suit are

A MediaNews group spokesman (spokesman= Got salt?) says that the newspapers do not overlap (in delivery apparently) with the three sought papers and that state and federal people are reviewing the purchase.  (Yeah, like Bush and Schwarzenegger ever found a monopoly that couldn't be hit for higher campaign donations.)

But MediaNews financial backers own even more Northern California papers.  Up front is the Heart Corporation which we don't even need to google for the name a major bay area newspaper ownership.  Also included in the backing of Media Newsgroup are the Gannet Corporation and the Stevens Media Group as reported by both sources we've linked to so far.  (KARE11 has a more convoluted route where Heast buys the Monterey Herald and then transfers the paper to MediaNews and gets shares in all papers outside of the immediate San Fransico Bay area.  KARE also notes that MediaNews Group will get 54% of the resultant partnership.

To identify the California media properties of the corporations involved we can turn to Columbia Journalism Revue:

The McClatchy Company is reported by CJR.org as owning. 

• The Sacramento Bee
• The Modesto Bee
• The Fresno Bee
  
• El Sol
  
• Neighbors CityView
  
• The Clovis Independent
  
• Visalia CityView
  
• Vida en el Valle

Most of which I can identify as being in the "central" part of California but in the interior, the Central Valley.  This is the group selling off the 3 other area (central coastal California) newspapers.

MediaNews Group:

• Alameda Times-Star, Oakland
  
• Argus (Fremont)
  
• Chico Enterprise-Record
  
• Daily Democrat (Woodland)
  
• Daily Review (Hayward)
  
• Eureka Times-Standard
  
• Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario)
  
• L.A. Daily News
  
• Lompoc Record (Lompoc)
  
• Long Beach Press-Telegram
  
• Marin Independent Journal
  
• Oakland Tribune
  
• Oroville Mercury-Register
  
• Pasadena Star-News
  
• Red Bluff Daily News
  
• Redlands Daily Facts
  
• San Bernardino County Sun
  
• San Gabriel Valley Tribune
  
• San Mateo County Times
  
• Times-Herald (Vallejo)
  
• Tri-Valley Herald (Pleasanton)
  
• Ukiah Daily Journal (Ukiah)
  
• Whittier Daily News

The titles in lime are northern and central (mostly central coastal) California publications

The Gannet Corporation,  according to the same source is the owner of USA Today (I knew, I'd heard of them) and in California

• The Desert Sun (Palm Springs)
  
• The Californian (Salinas) (Salinas is very close to Monterey)
  
• Tulare Advance -Register
  
• Visalia Times-Delta

The cities of Visalia and Tulare seem to be about 150 miles from the San Jose (lower SF bay) area according to a Yahoo map an d 50 miles from Salinas and Monterey.  All the cities in the previous sentence are considered to be in the Central portion of California when the state is considered in 3 parts.  Visalia and Tulare (the latter also gives it's name to a California county) fall just below a division of the extremely long state into "north" and "south".  Palm Springs though is the only truly Southern California city in the above list.

The Hearst Corporation's only area newspaper is the Chronicle, but it owns TV stations in Sacramento (central cnterior) and Monterey (location of one of the newspapers up for sale).

The Stevens Media Group appears so far to be clean of California news assets.

In fact, it does look like one group with many central California news venues is selling to another group with the same.   Though McClatchy central California's papers are actually further away from the bay area and central coastal newspapers than the MediaNews Groups.  So this sale isn't about McClatchy having problems with anti-trust, but may be about the deeper pockets of MediaNews Group, Gannett, and Hearst (with an assist by Stephens).  Gannett and Media News I've seen on a list of the big money people in the news business and McClatchy in those whose pockets are empty.  I don't remember seeing where Hearst fell, but I can't believe they'd be on the sidewalk trying to hawk papers like McClatchy apparently is. 

If McClatchy wants to sell papers they should find a group with less central coast mud already clinging to the shoes.  Where I live I can get the LA Times, the Daily Breeze, the LA Daily News, the Long Beach Press Telegram, and the Orange County Register.  It sounds like after all McClatchy's wheeling and dealing is done, if I were living in the Bay area, all those papers might be owned by the same consortium controlled by the same types of minds .  So much for the free press.

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