McClatchy

McClatchy's 2020 bankruptcy ended 163 years of newspaper publishing, including the Miami Herald and Sacramento Bee. The company had acquired Knight Ridder in 2006 for $4.5 billion, loading itself with debt just as digital advertising destroyed print media economics. Each newspaper that had once been profitable became a cash drain as subscribers and advertisers migrated online. The mechanism failure was acquisition timing at peak asset value. McClatchy bought Knight Ridder at the exact moment newspapers were most valuable and least sustainable. The debt from that acquisition consumed resources needed for digital transformation. This is the biological equivalent of an organism that gorges at the feast and then starves during the famine—the acquisition that seemed strategic became the debt that prevented adaptation. Digital media disruption was predictable but unstoppable. Craigslist captured classified advertising; Facebook and Google captured display advertising; news became commoditized. McClatchy's journalism won Pulitzer Prizes but couldn't win customers back from free alternatives.