By: Philip M. Glende
I worked as an editor at Knight Ridder newspapers for nearly a decade, concluding with three-plus years at the Akron Beacon Journal, just steps from the office occupied by the late John S. Knight. For more than a decade after getting my doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, I had been thinking that I would like to a do a full-scale biography of Knight, who was active from the 1930s to the 1970s and built Knight Ridder from the little Akron paper to what was once the largest newspaper company in the nation. 
Knight left an extensive collection of personal and business papers at the University of Akron. I started working with the online portion of the Knight collection several years ago. The Joseph McKerns Research Grant allowed me to travel to Akron last fall to begin working with parts of the collection not available online, including correspondence with Basil L. Walters, his top editor while he owned the Chicago Daily News from 1944 to 1959. The collection also includes many photographs of Knight’s professional life, such as those documenting the unscheduled visit of President Lyndon Johnson to the Beacon Journal after the paper endorsed Johnson over Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. (Knight, a Republican who was a consistent critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam, thought Johnson was “best qualified by experience and temperament” to deal with the problems facing the nation.) The collection also includes scrapbooks containing the more than two thousand columns Knight wrote under the heading “The Editor’s Notebook,” which established Knight’s credentials as a working journalist in addition to a newspaper chain builder. Though one could go through the Beacon Journal for forty years to read his columns, the scrapbooks provided a convenient opportunity to skim the entirety of his work.
Knight was active during a period of dramatic change in the newspaper industry in the twentieth century. He built Knight Newspapers into a vast chain that included prize-winning papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Detroit Free Press, Charlotte Observer, San Jose Mercury News, and the Beacon Journal. Knight believed in good newspapers as a business model, and he was an early advocate of readability, visual appeal, lively writing, human interest stories, and interpretive reporting. He also believed newspapers had a civic responsibility, and he repeatedly warned against treating newspapers as little more than cash registers. Knight was an industry leader as the business evolved from independently owned local newspapers to vast publicly owned corporations. When Knight retired in the mid-1970s, newspapers, especially those in the Knight Ridder chain and other respected groups, were better in many ways than in earlier years, but the industry was already on the way to its demise. Newspaper groups went public in the 1960s and 1970s, in part for greater access to capital, but that committed newspapers to prioritize investors over readers or long-term sustainability, it gave analysts and profit-focused institutional investors a role in newspaper management, and it set the stage for the gutting of the industry when advertising and circulation revenue declined in the twenty-first century.
My trip to the Archives and Special Collections at the University Libraries in Akron was a great opportunity to immerse myself in Knight’s professional life. I want to thank the American Journalism Historians Association, former research chair Gerry Lanosga, and the research committee for approving my application. The grant was a significant boost as I was in the early stages of this project. I hope to be able to share this research with other scholars soon.
Philip M. Glende previously served as the director of student media at Indiana State University and worked as a journalist and newsroom manager.
