Knight Ridder

So yes, I do feel particularly, and a lot of my experience has been in big metropolitan, uh, newspapers, what we used to call destination [laughs] papers in the United States.

Um, large organizations, Tribune, Knight Ridder, the Miami Herald, uh, the Chicago Tribune.

And, um, I think that all of those, uh, news organizations, and of course I interacted heavily with other news organizations, um, when I was working f- at Solutions Journalism Network, but even before, colleagues, and, um, I could see firsthand how difficult it was for members of the public to access, uh, anybody in a, um-

Wow

My career path has definitely not been straight.

I actually graduated from college in the tech boom, and I was interested in journalism and made a mistake move where I joined a company that had gotten acquired by Knight Ridder, thinking I was getting my foot in the door into journalism.

It was actually the Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk startup, Zip2 Media.

They'd gotten, had gotten acquired by Knight Ridder.

And, um, what they-- I worked at the sales and marketing firm selling websites, marketing, and ads, um, for local businesses.

And then that just got me into the dot-com boom with different startups.

McClatchy was a smaller newspaper company and only had about a dozen papers and it bought McClatchy.

a much larger newspaper company, Knight Ritter.

It took on billions of dollars to debt to do that, and it never recovered.

Now, it made from that, and it eventually went into bankruptcy.

And it's, uh, and it's exciting to see.

Uh, I, um, when Knight Ridder was, uh, had the newspaper when I was there, and this is like, you know, eons ago, uh, it was just one of the, the jewels of the, of the journalism industry.

Uh, and you know, the things have kind of gone sideways there.

I'm just excited for Columbus as you're having some local, uh, local folks doing local stories as opposed to having some centralized desk somewhere in Nashville trying to tell you how to do your stuff there in Columbus.