Saturday, November 19, 2005

Ellisblog Back!


Out of the blue, a man named Tunku asked me to write a short piece about Knight Ridder. So I did.

Postscript: A couple of readers emailed to ask: "did you realize that the AP is a not-for-profit co-operative owned by its member papers?" The answer is yes, I did. Thus its www.ap.org URL.

The fact that it now exists as a not-for-profit co-operative owned by its member papers does not mean that it must continue to exist as such. It can be reconfigured. That's what investment bankers and $1000-an-hour New York lawyers do. They reconfigure things! And the pressure is on the AP board to perform, to say the least. One way they might perform is to sell it to Google at 2x or 3x revenues.

Had I had more words to work with (the WSJ gave me a word count of 600), I would have addressed this issue in detail. But I didn't, so I didn't.