The Ridders Buy Again

As publishers of a string of dailies,* the Ridder family likes to buy & sell newspapers wherever "there's a good market." Less than two years ago they sold their thriving Chicago Journal of Commerce to the Wall Street Journal (TIME, Jan. 8, 1951) because, said Editor Bernard J. Ridder, "they offered us more than it was worth, and there's a limit to how far you'll go to hold on to something." Last week the Ridders were in a buying mood. Into booming San Jose, Calif, they went to take over the San Jose evening News and morning Mercury (total circ. 72,000) for a reported price of $3,700,000 from the newspapers' present owners.

Into San Jose as the new publisher will go Joseph Ridder, 32, now general manager of the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press. The Ridders picked well. They have a monopoly in San Jose and dominate an expanding industrial area. They now have their eyes on two other California papers, the Long Beach Independent and Press-Telegram.

*St. Paul (Minn.) Dispatch and Pioneer Press, Duluth Herald and News-Tribune, the Aberdeen (S.Dak.) American-News, Grand Forks (N. Dak.) Herald, Manhattan's Journal of Commerce, the German-language Staats-Zeitung & Herald, and a large block of stock in the Seattle Times.

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