In a newspaper swap, ownership of The Daily Olympian has been transfered to the Knight Ridder news organization. Read about it here. Some think that this is a good thing:

Seattle Times
"My reason for some optimism in Bellingham and Olympia is that Knight Ridder at least has a distinguished past," writes Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University. "The same cannot be said for Gannett, always a bottom-line corporation."

Here's a link to the company's corporate history.


My understanding is that Knight Ridder was the only news outlet that actually didn't buy what was coming out of US gov't sources during the run up to the war in Iraq and actually did some investigative reporting about WMD. There is some evidence of K-R's independence here and here.

Here's a bit from On The Media.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Clark Hoyt, Washington editor of Knight Ridder, writes that my interview with reporter Walter Pincus (quote) "left the false impression that the Washington Post was way ahead of other media in fact-checking the Bush administration on the war in Iraq. "In the critical period leading up to the war, the Post's coverage mostly reflected official White House and Pentagon views. Pincus wrote on the Post's front page, for example, that intelligence officials believed that Saddam Hussein would be toppled by a coup on the eve of an American invasion. Knight Ridder, the nation's second largest newspaper company, was virtually alone in reporting that senior military officers and intelligence officials believed the administration was overstating the dangers posed by Saddam, exaggerating his ties to al Qaida and downplaying the dangers of a new war in the Middle East. The Post is a great newspaper, but it was way behind the curve on this story at a time when it could have mattered."