My wife (whom I have named in many other columns, but won't here--it would take about two seconds to figure it out if you're really curious) works for McClatchy, the newspaper company that announced plans to buy the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain last week. The deal won't be final before summer, but barring some completely unforeseen circumstances, it's done. I have no inside knowledge of the negotiations or the future plans of the company (my wife doesn't either, so don't ask), but as someone who has seen up close how McClatchy operates for some seven years, I thought I might be able to provide some insight. For those of my readers who were hoping to read something interesting, you might try back next week.

The simple reason why McClatchy did it is because this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In the not-so-distant past, K-R was considered one of the finest (if not the finest) collection of newspapers around. The chain was regarded as one that valued journalism as much as profit, and by and large I'd have to agree with that sentiment. Then K-R bought hard into the Internet. It blew more than two million dollars (and moved its headquarters from Miami to San Jose) chasing that chimera. When the bubble burst, K-R gutted the newsrooms of its newspapers, with predictable results.

Last Christmas while we were visiting my folks in Kansas City, the Star ran a photo essay on "The 12 Dogs of Christmas" in its feature section. It was, in short, a bad idea done poorly. My parents assured me that much worse has appeared. In the early part of the 20th century, the Kansas City Star was one of the great papers of this nation, not far removed from the New York Times and certainly well ahead of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. To see such a proud paper reduced to the "12 Dogs of Christmas" under K-R rule was truly disheartening.

Some of the analysts of the deal have noted that McClatchy is planning to sell most of the newspapers where the newsrooms are represented by the Newspaper Guild, the intimation being that heavily union newsrooms aren't on McClatchy's wish list. That may be true, but the real truth is that most newspapers have unionized back shops. The folks who actually put the paper together, load it on trucks and move those papers to distribution centers are all, by and large, in one union or another. And there are more of those folks than there are in newsrooms. Newsroom unions can be somewhat more stubborn than most, but I'd say its obvious that McClatchy kept the newspapers that made at least 20 percent profit and jettisoned the rest. It's certainly possible that the presence of strong unions may have helped add one or two to the list of K-R newspapers McClatchy intends to sell, but I don't think that factor was as important as some would like to think.

It's true that McClatchy doesn't pay well compared to other chains. We have friends who have come to the News & Observer in Raleigh from other newspapers, and many of them have taken pay cuts to do so. Indeed, Barbara moved from a 40,000 circulation Guild newspaper to the 160,000 circulation N&O and received essentially the same pay. But here's the deal: in a time when most newspapers have been culling their newsroom staffs, McClatchy papers have steadfastly refused to lay off people. Sometimes they do reduce staff by attrition, but in the case of the N&O, the staffing levels seem to have stayed about the same. I do believe there is a sense among the McClatchy top brass that if they were to keep a some of the big K-R papers (Philadelphia and San Jose in particular) that they would have to prune the staffs even more than has been done in years past. In other words, better to sell than lay off.

I'm sympathetic to that. And while McClatchy doesn't lay out the largesse willy nilly, when my wife was asked to take the DC job, she told the brass what she needed to make in order to take the position. After lengthy negotiations, she got what we needed. Which wasn't all that surprising. When really big news happens (and in North Carolina, that tends to be a hurricane), McClatchy has been more than willing to pay what is necessary to get the entire story. That puts it in a minority when it comes to corporate newspaper owners.

The truth of the matter is that my wife and her co-workers have been very concerned about what might happen if McClatchy bought K-R. Would the devotion to journalism that has marked the company in the past survive the need to pay off a massive ($5.75 billion) debt? Given the money likely to be raised by the sale of 12 K-R newspapers (I'd put the figure conservatively at $1-2 billion), I'd guess yes. Newspapers may be facing relatively hard times, but they still make a lot of money--Craig's List and other Internet competitors notwithstanding. And the 20 papers McClatchy is keeping all make scads of money. The brass in Sacramento aren't stupid. At least, they haven't made a serious misstep yet.

And as for the question "Will newspapers survive?," I can only say we'd better hope so. Without the tenacious reporting of newspapers (and one mean bitch named Katrina) the nation might well believe that it is in good hands with the Prez. We know better, and the reason we know is that newspaper reporters are out there every day trying to find the truth. They don't always succeed, but they do often enough. My wife believes her job is a calling, one that is as sacred to the survival of democracy as the priesthood is to the survival of Catholicism. That implies a trust and responsibility, one that thousands of reporters every day do their best to fulfill. And now, with McClatchy taking charge of most of the old K-R empire, our democracy has a better chance of survival. The public will be informed, regardless of what the government wants.

Jon Worley has a journalism degree, and he shares his wife's strong feelings on the subject.