There is a long piece on the McClatchy Family in The Seattle Times:

Brown McClatchy Maloney of Sequim tells this story to illustrate how far The McClatchy Co., his family's newspaper chain, has come in 40 years:

In the late 1960s, another newspaper family put its Olympia and Bellingham papers up for sale. One of Maloney's older cousins thought McClatchy, whose only daily papers at the time were in Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto, Calif., should at least look into buying them.

He ran the idea past his septuagenarian aunt, who had run the company for more than three decades. Her response?

"If it wasn't in the [Central] Valley, we weren't interested," Maloney says.

Today, McClatchy's horizons extend far beyond the Sierras. On July 1, if all goes as planned, the chain will swallow Knight Ridder and become the nation's second-largest newspaper company, with 32 dailies stretching from Miami to Anchorage.

Among the 20 newspapers it would acquire: The Olympian and The Bellingham Herald.