Yesterday's News

TONY RIDDER’S roots in the “Fourth Estate” can be tracked all the way back to his paternal great-grandfather, the owner and publisher of the largest and most influential German-language daily in the United States, which became the cornerstone of the far-flung newspaper company Ridder Publications.

Tony would come fully into his own in the family business, spending a quarter of a century in the driver’s seat at the company’s San Jose Mercury News and growing it into what was widely acclaimed one of the ten best newspapers in the country.

After Ridder Publications merged with the much larger Knight Newspapers in 1974 to become the second biggest news-paper business in America (thirty-two dailies strong), Tony rose in the ranks to president of the newspaper division and then president, CEO, and chairman of the Fortune 500 company, whose crown jewels also included the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Detroit Free Press, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. As the only Ridder ever to lead the Knight-controlled enterprise, he could well be counted a triumph over nepotism.

As CEO, Tony performed a near-miraculous triple balancing act: he maintained the company’s position as a paragon of corporate social responsibility while both running a tight financial ship and expanding and revitalizing overall journalistic content, attested by an ever-escalating Pulitzer Prize count (Knight Ridder’s courageous coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath would also inspire both a Bill Moyers documentary and a Rob Reiner movie).

Ever in the vanguard, Tony foresaw the digital future and acquired stakes in a number of internet companies. Knight Ridder was ranked the most technologically innovative newspaper company in the country, and the San Jose Mercury News the country’s most internet-savvy daily.

When print newspapers began their irreversible decline in advertising and circulation, Tony read the writing on the wall. In 2006, he engineered the last great financial deal in the news industry, selling Knight Ridder to the McClatchy Company for billions of dollars.

Yesterday’s News, written with grace and concinnity and from a deep historical perspective, is both a case study of a company and an industry (the lowdown from the man long at the top) and an elegy to the bygone golden age of journalism.

The book is, as well, the story of two larger-than-life families. Tony’s maternal forebears were the old-line Delanos (his grandfather was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first cousin), and his childhood summers were spent on their legendary Hudson River Valley estate.

In these pages, Tony reaches back across the whole of his extraordinary life. Making for heart-pounding reading is his account of the accident he sustained when he was three that amounted to a near-death experience, not to mention the multiple death threats he received in his capacity as a high-profile newspaper-industry leader.

Tony Ridder (1940 - ) was the leader of the longtime second-biggest newspaper corporation in the United States, Knight Ridder, serving first as president of its newspaper division and then as president, chairman, and CEO of the Fortune 500 company. He is widely credited with having struck a brilliant balance between profitability and high-quality journalism for the 32 dailies in the chain, as well as for having presciently acquired stakes in a number of major internet ventures. He has served as president of the Newspaper Association of America and as a director of the Associated Press.