KNIGHT RIDDER buys community newspapers in Silicon Valley

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Knight Ridder
(NYSE: KRI) today announced the acquisition of Silicon Valley
Community Newspapers, which publishes eight weekly free-distribution
newspapers in the South Bay area surrounding San Jose. The eight are:
Los Gatos Weekly-Times, Saratoga News, Cupertino Courier, Sunnyvale
Sun, Campbell Reporter, Willow Glen Resident, Rose Garden Resident and
Almaden Resident. The group also includes the San Jose City Times, a
legal newspaper, and a glossy publication called Image.

The newspapers, which together comprise the assets of Silicon Valley
Community Newspapers, are weekly publications with a combined
circulation of more than 157,000. Terms of the transaction were not
disclosed.

Knight Ridder Senior Vice President Hilary Schneider said, "We believe
strongly in the importance of community journalism, which we know is
highly valued by readers. This group of tightly zoned weeklies will
help us extend our coverage of micro-communities in the Bay Area. They
serve a series of neighborhoods that are also highly desirable to
advertisers.

Greg Goff, Knight Ridder general manager/targeted publications, said,
These weeklies have been serving readers for 20 years. They provide
saturation coverage of their respective areas in the South Bay and are
a good fit with our Palo Alto Daily News Group of free dailies, which
are located primarily in the Peninsula. We're very pleased to be
adding them to our company.

David Cohen, currently publisher and CEO of the group, manages and
operates the publications and will continue to do so for Knight
Ridder. He will report to Goff. The plan is to maintain the operations
as they are now configured, Goff said.

Cohen said, "This was an easy decision, because I know that Knight
Ridder is committed to continuing our high quality, fiercely local
coverage. With the resources of Knight Ridder, we will be able to
fulfill our vision of bringing our brand of community journalism to a
greater audience.

The oldest of the papers dates back more than 120 years. The weeklies
provide coverage of local schools, youth sports, local government,
business, law enforcement, features, opinions and community profiles.

Knight Ridder is one of the nation's leading providers of news,
information and advertising, in print and online. The company
publishes 32 daily newspapers in 29 U.S. markets, with a readership of
8.5 million daily and 11.0 million Sunday. It has Web sites in all of
its markets and a variety of investments in Internet and technology
companies. It publishes a growing portfolio of targeted publications
and maintains investments in two newsprint companies. The company's
Internet operation, Knight Ridder Digital, develops and manages the
company's online properties. It is the founder and operator of Real
Cities (http://www.RealCities.com), the largest national network of
city and regional Web sites in more than 110 U.S. markets. Knight
Ridder and Knight Ridder Digital are headquartered in San Jose, Calif.

(NR)

SOURCE Knight Ridder Web Site: http://www.knightridder.com

NEWSPAPERS Free papers' growth threatens traditional news

Ideally, the free daily tabloids that are popping up in the Bay Area
and elsewhere like mushrooms after a rain would complement rather than
substitute for relatively high-quality paid newspapers like the San
Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. Commuters and shoppers
would pick up the free daily tabs to learn what the city council was
up to, and still subscribe to a broadsheet for regional and world
news. Young people would enjoy the brevity of the free papers, then
graduate" to more substantive broadsheets. People who won't pay to
read would still be informed. Print journalism would flourish,
providing new entry-level jobs at the free tabs -- without diminishing
the workforce of broadsheet journalists who have deep knowledge of the
community. That was the hope. The reality appears to be shaping up
differently. While the free papers have delivered on their promise to
increase awareness of hometown issues ignored by the metro press and
local TV newscasts, they also are replacing the paid dailies in some
people's lives. The result so far has been the spread of an
abbreviated, underfinanced "news lite," adding to the woes of paid
papers that have supplied the in-depth, public-service reporting that
Americans have come to expect from print.

Source: Michael Stoll, Grade the News
http://www.gradethenews.org/2005/freepapers3.htm

The general nature and structure of select wikis

A self-archived copy of presentation is available at [
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/TICER2005.ppt ] The
presentation reviews the general nature and structure of select wikis,
the features and functions of popular wiki software engines, and
describes the content and use of wikis by select businesses, colleges
and universities, and libraries.The presentation also speculated about
the wiki as an environment, framework, and venue for Disruptive
Scholarship, my proposed model for alternative scholarly authorship,
review, and publishing [
http://www.disruptivescholarship.blogspot.com/ ]

Yahoo! adds blogs to news section - Breaking - Technology - theage.com.au

Yahoo! adds blogs to news section - Breaking - Technology - theage.com.au: "Yahoo!'s online news search tool has added blog entries as a supplement to professional media offerings - an experiment that will test the public's appetite for information from alternative sources.

Under Yahoo!'s new approach, a keyword search for online news will include a list of relevant web logs, or 'blogs,' displayed in a box to the right of the results collected from mainstream journalism."