McClatchy history

At his death in 1883, the patriarch willed joint ownership of the paper to his two sons.

In 1922, the company launched The Fresno Bee.

C. K. obtained exclusive ownership of the paper in 1923 and began grooming his son, Carlos, as his successor.

Eleanor even made a very early foray into electronic news delivery in 1937, when she launched a year-long experiment into facsimile delivery of news and information.

She approached animator Walt Disney in 1943 about creating a logo for McClatchy, and he agreed.

McClatchy obtained its first television broadcasting license in Fresno in 1953, and added a Sacramento station a decade later.

C. K. had made his start in the family business in 1958 as a reporter for the Sacramento Bee.

McClatchy also acquired then-ABC affiliate KOVR from Metromedia in 1965.

After Eleanor McClatchy retired in 1978, her nephew C.K. McClatchy took charge, and expanded the company’s footprint beyond California for the first time, adding papers in Alaska and Washington state.

Acquired in 1979, the Gilroy (California) Dispatch and the Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News served their markets daily, while the Morgan Hill Times and Clovis Independent, both of California, appeared weekly.

Eleanor McClatchy passed the media company reigns to her nephew, Carlos's son Charles Kenny (C. K.) McClatchy, two years before her death in 1980.

After a five-year hiatus, McClatchy acquired the Tacoma News Tribune, a Washington daily, in 1986.

Eleanor passed the business on to her nephews Charles Kenney and James McClatchy, who further grew the business to $332 million in revenue by 1987.

The company entered an important growth market with its 1988 acquisition of Senior Spectrum, publisher of ten tabloids distributed throughout California.

In 1990, McClatchy acquired three dailies in South Carolina: The Herald in Rock Hill, The Island Packet in Hilton Head, and The Beaufort Gazette of Beaufort.

McClatchy added to this high-potential area with the 1991 acquisition of three editions of Senior World published in Washington state.

The year 1995 also saw the acquisition of the Peninsula Gateway, another Washington state weekly.

McClatchy divested five other West Coast weeklies in the fall of 1996.

However, like many ostensibly successful Internet ventures, it continued to lose millions of dollars per year through 1997.

In fact, by the time the acquisition was finalized in March 1998, McClatchy had made arrangements to sell two subsidiaries to Primedia Inc., thereby recovering $200 million of the purchase price.

He set up his hedge fund in Chatham, N.J., in 2002.

In January 2004, McClatchy bought the Merced Sun-Star of Merced, and five affiliated non-dailies in California's San Joaquin Valley.

Those sales were completed on August 2, 2006.

In addition to taking control of the supermarket-tabloid publisher American Media in 2014, Chatham is a major investor in Postmedia, the publisher of Canadian newspapers including The National Post, The Montreal Gazette and The Ottawa Citizen.

In January 2017, former Yahoo! and EarthLink executive Craig Forman was appointed as its new president and chief executive officer (CEO). Forman, a private investor and McClatchy board member, succeeded Patrick Talamantes, who was CEO the previous four years.

From the time shortly after the merger to the end of 2018, McClatchy’s work force went from more than 15,000 full-time employees to around 3,300, according to public filings.

In February 2019, Forman emailed all staff to say about 10 percent of the newspaper chain's employees would be offered voluntary buyouts.

On February 13, 2020, McClatchy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.