• Ad Age, Friday, March 17, 2006 11:15 AM

Advertising Age says the new McClatchy Company--the one beefed up by its purchase this week of Knight Ridder's papers--will continue to do what it has always done--keep its ad strategy focused on local markets.  The company has already announced it intends to sell some of the bigger papers it acquired from KR (its two Philadelphia papers, for example), thus minimizing opportunities for creating an effective new national ad matrix.  Instead, McClatchy will stick close to home with its ads.  "Wall Street analysts--who’ve seen past newspaper mega-mergers fail to deliver on promises for a synthetic national ad buy made up of far-flung titles that would rival USA Today and The New York Times--said McClatchy, now the nation’s No. 2 newspaper chain by circulation, is right to keep its focus local," writes Ann Marie Kerwin in Ad Age. "Its strategy has been to smother fast-growing regions with multiple titles.  'I don’t think they really care about national, even though they’re bound to get a lot more of it now,' says Deutsche Bank media analyst Paul Ginocchio. 'They don’t have the market size or critical mass to form a really effective buying network.'"

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