Yes, even McClatchy (NYSE: MNI ) has to let out a burp from time to time. Months after completing its gargantuan acquisition of Knight Ridder, the slow digestion process finds the newspaper giant letting go of one of its biggest stars.
The Star Tribune is being sold to a private equity firm for $530 million. The paper and its related website serve the Minneapolis market. There are 360,000 daily subscribers and 600,000 folks receiving the Sunday edition, giving the Star Tribune the 10th-widest Sunday circulation in the country.
The move comes as a bit of a surprise. Back in August, McClatchy sold off Knight Ridder's St. Paul Pioneer Press to MediaNews Group in order to avoid antitrust issues in the same market. Like Mary Tyler Moore as she shut off the lights of the fictional WJM newsroom in the series finale of her sitcom, McClatchy is also leaving the Twin Cities news market.
Print media is in trouble. We see it in the layoffs, fading circulation rates, and sluggish ad sales. However, the sector is getting an unlikely boost from the online giants that many say caused its downfall. Over the past few weeks, we've seen Google (Nasdaq: GOOG ) ramp up its efforts to sell print advertising, while Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO ) teamed up with a consortium of newspapers to beef up their online presence.
Yes, healthy Internet traffic is also helping the traditional printsmiths. Companies like New York Times (NYSE: NYT ) and Washington Post (NYSE: WPO ) have been emphasizing their Web offerings, and even in the latest McClatchy deal, StarTribune.com is being touted as the most visited site in the Twin Cities area, reaching 36% of the adult market.
This was a year when newspapers were swapped around like Pokemon cards and penny stocks. Let's hope that 2007 is a more steady year in which the names we trust for news offline become bigger players online.
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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz still subscribes to daily print newspapers like The Miami Herald and The Wall Street Journal. However, he still gets most of his news online. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. He is also part of theRule Breakersnewsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.The Fool has a disclosure policy.
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