McClatchy Company

On February 13, 2020, McClatchy Company filed for bankruptcy protection. The bankruptcy plan was accepted on August 4, 2020 resulting in the sale of the company to New Jersey hedge fund Chatham Asset Management LLC, previously a creditor of the business. The sale ended 163 years of control by the McClatchy family.

Chatham held $262 million in McClatchy debt, which was converted into equity in the new ownership structure. The company also contributed $49 million in cash, making the total value of the deal about $312 million. Chatham also owns magazine publisher American Media, Inc. Chatham is a New Jersey hedge fund founded in 2003 by Anthony Melchiorre, who previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The company manages over $4 billion in assets.

The past decade has been a financial disaster for McClatchy. From 2006 to 2018, company advertising revenue fell by 80% and daily print circulation fell by 58.6%.

McClatchy Company is a leading American newspaper company which publishes 29 daily newspapers and about 50 non-dailies from its base in Sacramento, California. Before declaring bankruptcy in 2020, it was a publicly traded company (NYSE: MNI) controlled by the McClatchy family. The family also has an interest in the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team.

McClatchy is a major investor in The Seattle Times Company, owning 49.5% of the voting stock and 70.6% of the nonvoting stock of the privately held company.

The company is known for its first publication, the Sacramento Bee, which was started in 1857 during the California Gold Rush by James McClatchy. The McClatchy Company bought the Merced Sun-Star in 2004, along with five other affiliated non-dailies in the San Joaquin Valley.

On March 13, 2006, the McClatchy Company agreed to buy newspaper publisher Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion in cash and stock.

Upon the completion of the purchase of Knight Ridder in June 2006, McClatchy sold 12 of the Knight Ridder newspapers. The company received about $2.1 billion for the sales. These newspapers included the San Jose Mercury News and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, both of which were acquired by MediaNews Group Inc. Also sold were the two major dailies in Philadephia, and the Akron Beacon Journal.

McClatchy acquired the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1998 as part of its acquisition of Cowles Media Company. In 2007, the Star Tribune was sold to private-equity firm Avista Capital Partners for $555 million.

In May 2014, McClatchy sold the Alaska Daily News (ADN) in Anchorage to Alaska Dispatch Publishing LLC for $34 million. The ADN had been McClatchy's only property in the state.

In October 2014, the company sold its 25.6% stake in Cars.com (Classified Ventures, LLC) to Gannett Company, netting $632 million.

McClatchy bought the Durham Herald-Sun from Paxton Media Group in December 2016. The deal gave McClatchy, which also owns the Raleigh News & Observer, two daily newspapers in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina.