What's black and white and red all over?

Gary Pruitt, super genius

Until a year or so ago, I wrote for a McClatchy owned newspaper. In the wave of this week's massive layoffs there, that 103-year-old name was shut down yesterday.

It's a crying shame. I have some good friends who are suddenly without a job. And McClatchy's idiotic purchase of Knight-Ridder is partly to blame. (And I said so at the time.)

Here's the skinny on the demise of McClatchy, if you're into the numbers. But it goes deeper than those perpetrating the newspaper racket will admit.

"...Wall Street's disenchantment with newspapers has also hit McClatchy particularly hard, with its stock collapsing more than 70% in the past year."

Yes, because The Street always knows the true value of things. And newspapers are valued by nobody but the people who run them anymore.

"...If any company has a shot of emerging in good shape from the debt crisis, it's McClatchy, analysts say."

That's a big "if" there, boys. Leave it to Editor & Publisher to put the best spin on things as possible, of course.

Papers will only survive by delving wholeheartedly into new media as their core and reducing themselves otherwise to a footprint the market will allow...which could be much smaller than the "Fourth Estate" in all its elitist arrogance since the 1960s will accept from here on out.

(Click here for more fun.)