Tony Ridder Quotes (17 Quotes)

Third-quarter operating results were held back by continuing advertising softness, exacerbated by the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, ... In the aftermath, most advertisers curtailed or canceled their normal schedules for the better part of two weeks.

Ad revenue growth in February and March, boosted by the early Easter, was the strongest we have seen since the first quarter of 1998. Our focus on operations, with emphasis on cost control and margin improvement, is clearly paying off.

I'm not sure there's anybody who had more knowledge of the community or was better connected than Harry. He knew every politician of his day and had a good working relationship with them.

a nationally read paper capable of being leveraged in the online market.

The newspaper business is strong in most markets, and we continue to restructure culturally to take advantage of it,

The newspaper business is a great business, ... We've just made the biggest acquisition in the history of our industry when we bought four newspapers from Disney ( DIS ). We think the newspaper business in print form . . . is a very, very good business.

The quarter was challenging. With total ad revenue up only 1 percent, and with the persistence of the soft revenue patterns across the industry for many months now (employment and real estate excepted), we continue to look to the second half for improvement.

The last few years have been very strong for the newspaper industry, ... And we think next year is going to be a very good year, as well.

strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value, including the possible sale of the company.

While the fundamentals of this quarter were disappointing, we took important steps to position our company for a strong future in both print and online publishing, and our accomplishments were significant,

As promised, we delivered a very strong earnings-per-share (excluding nonrecurring items) performance in 1998, ... We did this in a year where not everything was going our way, which demonstrates our ability-and commitment-to tight management despite soft revenues in key markets.

Although business started to revive a couple of weeks after the terrorist attack, the initiation of bombing in Afghanistan caused another slowdown, ... Our ultimate performance will be contingent upon resumption of more normal business patterns.

We promised a strong bottom-line performance this year, and we are going to deliver, ... We have offset some tightening in the revenue environment with tough cost discipline, and that will not be a one-time event.

Despite flat revenue, we beat the Street's consensus (earnings forecast) by 2 cents and faced by far the stiffest advertising comparisons of the year.

In all of the cities where we have newspapers, we run the business.

This is a difficult time in so many ways, but in no way greater than having to disrupt the lives and trust of Knight Ridder people with whom we have worked so closely. But I do feel we have no choice.

We'd consider it, but we don't have any control over the Times board. Who would buy something like that