Leftovers: Cheap Booze!

• Tonight in Center City, a whole bunch o’ restaurants are offering $4 cocktails, $3 wine and $2 booze. And this happens every Wednesday until Aug. 30! Sadly, the Center City District’s plan to drop 400 beach balls at 16th and Market was cancelled due to inclement weather; if you’re in the market for a beach ball, try and contact the CCD and see if they’ll give you one. [Center City District via The 14th Windiest State]

• Three more Knight Ridder papers have been sold, which leaves three to go, according to my calculations. [Akron Beacon Journal]

• In case you haven’t been up on Barbaro news, the president of Penn visited him last week. Give it a few weeks before Bush comes down to see everyone’s favorite horse. [Daily Pennsylvanian]

• The moral of the story: Don’t trust online mail order pharmacies to keep your info private. [Romenesko]

• See, it’s not just good players who take illegal supplements; it’sshitty ex-Phillies, too. [The Clog]

• The Phillies game is starting, like, now. Go Ryan Madson! Pitch like Jason Grimley on HGH! Er, wait, pitch better than that. [Yahoo! Sports]

Barricade the windows!

Somewhat lost in the hubub over the announcement of Knight Ridder’s sale earlier this week is the money to be made by the man who started it all: Bruce Sherman.

Sherman, you see, started this whole sell-Knight Ridder crazy when the company’s largest shareholder said the company was underperforming and urging the board to sell itself. Sherman is the CEO of Legg Mason’s Private Capital Management LP. And, he did this only a few months after Sherman’s company became the majority stockholder.

I don’t quite understand how that works, but I do understand that it’s funny when it doesn’t quite work out:

On Monday, Sherman apparently got his wish when McClatchy announced it would buy Knight Ridder, the nation’s second-largest newspaper company and owner of the Mercury News.

But the price — $67.25 a share in the $4.5 billion deal — is well below historic premiums paid for newspapers. And it means that for all his trouble, Sherman — who paid an average of $65 a share for his stock — will barely break even on his Knight Ridder investment.

Even that modest victory is not assured because Sherman and other shareholders will be paid with a mix of cash and McClatchy stock, which has fallen 3.8 percent since the deal was announced. In addition, Sherman has seen his sizable McClatchy holdings lose $55.6 million in value since the beginning of the year when the company emerged as a bidder for Knight Ridder…. interest turned out to be tepid, with only two bids ultimately submitted. And the price paid by McClatchy was 10.4 EBITDA — what Merrill Lynch’s Fine termed “well below historical… multiples.”

There was an article a while back that said Sherman was trying to unload the stock in order to meet certain growth targets by Aug. 1, 2006. With that selling price, Sherman better get off his gold-plated toilet (note: he may not have a gold-plated toilet) and get to work.

KR Sale: Mixed result for investor [San Jose Mercury-News]

It’s a sale! Every newspaper must go!

The big media news today is that Knight Ridder — parent company of the Inquirer and Daily News — has agreed to sell itself to McClatchy. The Sacramento-based company will then sell 12 of the 32 papers it buys, saying those papers don’t fit the company’s model of buying newspapers in growing markets. (Yes, bashing the assets before you sell them seems like a strange move. But, then again, I don’t know business.)

Two of those papers in non-growing markets are, of course, the Inky and Daily News. McClatchy hasn’t said if it’s going to sell the two as a package, but that seems like the most sensible idea. (Selling them separately would make no sense for the buyer of whichever paper moving out of 400 N. Broad, i.e. the Daily News.) The company also hasn’t said if it will only sell them as a package or just sell the Inky or close the DN.

Obviously, this sucks for the people at the 12 papers being sold again, but MediaNews — who couldn’t negotiate a deal with Gannett to make a big for Knight Ridder — is said to be interested in some of McClatchy’s new urban papers its looking to sell. That’d be the Inky and DN.

As with any story like this, more news when it (a) develops or (b) gets funny.

McClatchy to buy Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion, sell Inquirer and Daily News [AP/Philly.com]

Knight Ridder Bee-ing bought soon?

Yesterday was the deadline for the submission of bids for newspaper chain Knight Ridder, which is selling itself because, uhm, some company who bought a large stake in the company recently told them they should. And the frontrunner appears to be McClatchy, which is the owner of the Sacramento Bee, the Fresno Bee, &c., and has an annoying habit of naming its papers the [Something] Bee.

But wait! The (McClatchy-owned) Star-Tribune in Minneapolis says the likely winner is the McNews pairing of Gannett and MediaNews. And then, also, there’s the bid from Bain/Thomas H. Lee and a bunch of other private equity firms are also considering a buy.

Ugh… all of this makes my head spin. McClatchy is probably the best fit, since it’s headquartered in Sacramento, and already has the newspaper exec overhead, and could save a lot of money by slashing those jobs. That’s probably better for the journalism side, too, not that other people losing their jobs are going to feel good about it.

But, sadly, any scenario — one of the three buyers, or KR not selling at all — means that the Daily News is likely to close. That’s good for the freebie papers in town, I’d assume, but is bad for journalism and for the people over at 400 N. Broad and Philadelphia, since it’s currently the far more interesting paper of the two dailies. (Disclosure: It’s also bad for, uh, my dad, who works there.)

Let me submit a better way to save money: Get rid of FreeZee, the cartoon rapper on this post. I found him on an official Knight Ridder site. Here’s his story:

Rap star FreeZee’s hometown mansion could replace Goldenrod Elementary School that’s set to close because it’s old and unsafe. But to earn their new school, FreeZee sends the students on a cross-country scavenger hunt. As they follow FreeZee’s rap clues, they learn about their rights and roots, but if they get brain freeze, the hunt’s over and there’s no new school!

I have no idea what he teaches kids, but I bet he costs a lot.

Merrill Says McClatchy Most Likely Knight Ridder Winner [E&P]
Bain, Thomas H. Lee expected to bid for Knight Ridder newspaper group [Boston Business Journal]
Brain Freeze [Knight Ridder Productions]