By: Employees at the Times Leader, a 127-year-old daily newspaper in northeastern Pennsylvania, feel a little bit like the kid on the playground who is the last one picked for a game.
McClatchy Co. announced Wednesday that it has found buyers for five more of the Knight Ridder Inc. newspapers that it plans to dump, making the Times Leader the only paper still on the auction block.
Analysts say the paper is the least attractive among the 12 Knight Ridder "orphans" not being kept by McClatchy because it has head-to-head competition from The Citizens' Voice, a daily tabloid founded in 1978 by striking Times Leader workers.
"Most newspaper companies are loathe to acquire a property in that kind of competitive situation," said analyst John Morton, who heads Morton Research Inc.
Bids for the Times Leader were due May 31, and McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt said in a statement Wednesday that he expects to announce the sale of the Times Leader in the next few weeks. The Sacramento, Calif.-based company declined to reveal the number of bids or identify the bidders.
"We have no signed final agreement for Wilkes-Barre," Pruitt told the Times Leader for Thursday editions. "We want to get it wrapped up as soon as possible. We don't want to continue the uncertainty for the Times Leader, its employees and the community."
Though disappointed they still don't know their fate, newsroom employees carried on Thursday as if it was just another day at the office.
"I think people are getting a little dull to it," Editor Matt Golas said. "It's been going on too long, and I think people just want to get on with it. At least you can distract yourself with work."
McClatchy said in March that it planned to buy Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion in cash and stock, but that it would keep only 20 of the 32 Knight Ridder papers because most of the others were located in stagnant or declining markets.
On Wednesday, it announced deals involving five newspapers: the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio; Duluth News Tribune in Minnesota; Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota; The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel in Indiana and the Aberdeen American News in South Dakota.
Analysts say a logical suitor for the Times Leader is Times-Shamrock Communications, the parent company of The Citizens' Voice, which could buy its crosstown rival, shut it down and corner the advertising market.
A sale to Times-Shamrock, however, would likely trigger a federal antitrust review.
Times-Shamrock has repeatedly declined to say whether it submitted a bid, although company officials recently toured the Times Leader.
The Times Leader has reported the identities of several other potential bidders, including a group assembled by current Publisher Pat McHugh; another one led by a former Times Leader publisher; Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., of Birmingham, Ala.; and Yucaipa Cos. of Los Angeles, which is working with a newspaper union.
But Times Leader staffers said they are most concerned about a sale to Times-Shamrock, which owns newspapers and radio stations throughout northeastern Pennsylvania.
Editors and columnists have repeatedly attacked the Scranton-based media conglomerate in print in recent weeks; and an editorial called the Citizens' Voice "hapless, lazy, hopeless."
The Voice started out as a strike paper in October 1978, when more than 200 Times Leader employees walked off the job to protest what they saw as union-busting tactics by the paper's then-owner, New York-based Capital Cities Communications.
The strikers never did go back to work, and the two newspapers have been battling fiercely for scoops and advertising dollars ever since.
According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Times Leader had 40,457 in average Monday-Friday circulation for the six-month period ending in March; The Citizens' Voice had 32,890.
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