ha

I love it -- two big papers have been taking jabs at each other all year. The Pioneer Press was recently sold and more recently took significant cuts in its newsroom staff. Today, the Star Tribune announced it had been sold to a company that owns no other dailies. Their articles on the sale are very different -- and therefore very funny.

The Strib says:

The McClatchy Co. capped a year of dramatic changes in the newspaper industry Tuesday by announcing the surprise sale of the Star Tribune, its largest newspaper, to a private investment group.

The $530 million sale will place the future of Minnesota's dominant newspaper in the hands of Avista Capital Partners, a New York-based partnership of former investment bankers. It also continues a trend that accelerated this year in which large newspaper companies, such as McClatchy, Knight Ridder and Tribune, either winnowed their holdings or put themselves up for sale. Private owners have emerged to bid for many of the big-city papers that have come into play as a result.

McClatchy has played a major role in that change, agreeing to buy all of Knight Ridder Inc. last spring. Sacramento, Calif.-based McClatchy then sold a number of the Knight Ridder papers it considered to be less desirable, including the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which is now run by privately held MediaNews Group Inc. of Denver.

Those sales concluded by the fall, however, and the Star Tribune had not been viewed within the industry as a candidate for sale.

McClatchy paid $1.2 billion for the newspaper in 1998. Although its circulation and advertising results in the past several years had run into the same headwinds that other large dailies have encountered, the Star Tribune remains solidly profitable.

And the Pioneer Press says:

Newspaper publisher The McClatchy Co. said on Tuesday that it will sell its flagship newspaper Star Tribune to a private equity firm for $530 million, a sharp drop from the $1.2 billion it paid to acquire the newspaper just eight years ago.

McClatchy said it decided to sell the newspaper to Avista Capital Partners through a private bidding process "after a strategic reevaluation of its portfolio of holdings" following McClatchy's purchase of Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion earlier this year.

McClatchy faces a large tax bill from selling off 12 other newspapers earlier this year as part of its purchase of Knight Ridder. It said the tax benefit of selling the Star Tribune at a loss is worth $160 million, raising the total value of the deal to $690 million.

McClatchy chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt said in a written statement that the Star Tribune "is a profitable business that has generated significant returns for the company over the years. However, as we continue to analyze our business following the Knight Ridder acquisition, it became clear that selling the Star Tribune strengthens McClatchy's competitive position."