• Business Week, Monday, March 20, 2006 11 AM

Gary Pruitt is 48, a former First Amendment attorney, and hip to popular culture.  For years, he's been spoken of as one of the brightest lights in the executive ranks of the newspaper industry, a leader who understands its fast-changing contours and has some strong ideas what what needs to be done to keep papers' vital. Now, as head of the McClatchy Company, which is purchasing Knight Ridder, he will have an opportunity to prove his stuff.  But while he's eager to get on with it--especially the sale of KR assets that don't fit into his company's long-range strategy--he poo-poohs the notion that he's the industry's great white hope.  So he says to Jon Fine, Business Week's media columnist.  Fine is obviously a fan of Pruitt's, saying, he "believes, touchingly, in newspapers. He tells me that newspapers' online revenues may not exceed print revenues even 10 years hence, which is probably right, and that the growth of craigslist and other almost wholly free classified sites 'does not mean that [newspapers' classified] revenues over time will shrink,' which is almost certainly wrong. Still, he has managed to please both Wall Street analysts worried about numbers--in press accounts they sound like high schoolers with crushes--and editorial types worried about journalism."  Fine also has a warning for staffers and newspapers that will be sold off by McClatchy:  You'll likely not be as nicely treated by your new owner as you would have been under Pruitt's stewardship.  

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