Par Ridder Now Fighting to Get 'Strib' Job Back

By: About two months after being banished from the Star Tribune, former publisher Par Ridder is fighting the court order that bars him from working at the newspaper.

The Star Tribune and Ridder filed papers with the Minnesota Court of Appeals in recent days seeking to overturn a decision preventing him from leading the state's largest newspaper until September 2008.

Ramsey County District Court Judge David Higgs ruled this September that Ridder caused "irreparable harm" when he defected from the rival St. Paul Pioneer Press. His old newspaper accused him of taking trade secrets with him.

Another executive who sought to follow Ridder to the Star Tribune, advertising manager Jennifer Parratt, also filed an appeal of Higg's ruling barring her from joining the Minneapolis paper until a non-compete clause in her Pioneer Press contract expires.

Notices of the appeals were filed last Friday and this Monday. The appeals also challenge a ruling that the Star Tribune must pay the Pioneer Press' attorney fees and expert costs in the case.

Phone and e-mail messages left with attorneys on both sides of the case were not immediately returned Thursday.

Ridder left as publisher of the Pioneer Press in March, ending a family relationship with the paper that dated to 1927. His decision to join the Star Tribune was a bigger shock.

The Pioneer Press sued. Among other things, it claimed Ridder copied budgets, advertiser rates and other files from his Pioneer Press computer.

In its filing, the Star Tribune disputes that Ridder's leap to the crosstown paper harmed his old employer.

"The evidence showed that Mr. Ridder had never accessed any information that could be used to injure the Pioneer Press, and that all of the information Mr. Ridder had taken had since been quarantined and was no longer accessible to Mr. Ridder or to anyone at the Star Tribune," Robert Weinstine, a lawyer for the Star Tribune's parent company, wrote in court papers filed Monday.

Ridder's own appeal, filed by attorney David Turner, argued that Ridder shouldn't have been removed until after a full trial was held.

No date for an Appeals Court hearing has been set in the case.

The Star Tribune is owned by Avista Capital Partners LP, while MediaNews Group Inc. now owns the Pioneer Press, which used to be part of the defunct Knight Ridder Inc. chain.