Final Segment 1 Title: 'The Sell Block' .  .  .  .  . Featured Stock(s): McClatchy Co. (MNI) See MNI's official website here. See the Yahoo! Finance profile for MNI here. See Closing Segment 2, below...

After this segment, you can see Jim's Sudden:Death picks here...

        

JJC:    It's time to add a new name to the Sell Block... and a new face to the ignominious Mad Money Wall of Shame...

The stock?...  McClatchy Co. (MNI)...  the nare-do-well newspaper company... which is probably already in here on at least one count, as you know I've hated print almost as much as radio...

And who's the face?...  The face is MNI's CEO, a walking disaster...  This guy's a walking black hole for shareholder value...  the amazingly-inept... his name is Gary Pruitt.

But he has wrecked the company itself...  Meet Gary Pruitt...  the guy who took the best-run, most conservative newspaper chain, and wrecked it with the worst acquisitions I've ever seen.

This guy's middle name should be "chump"...   No...  you know who he really is...  He's "Schemp!"...   Remember Schemp?  He was like the worst (of the Three Stooges)...  He couldn't even cut it with the Stooges.  I like "Schemp" more than "chump"...

.  .  .  .  .

We've talked about the decline of print media before...  And, if you want to know how poorly MNI's doing, just take a look at how the stock's done, since the catastrophic acquisition of Knight-Ridder closed...  a deal, of course, done by Schemp Pruitt...

The stock is down 82% since Schemp announced the deal on March 13th of 2007 - what a chart... when MNI was at $51.55.  That's down $40!

.  .  .  .  .

MNI's plagued by a weak ad spending market.  They all are... So is Gannett (GCI) too... but c'mon...

You have to understand that this was the best though...  This thing could have been doing just fine, if it weren't for Schemp...

Things were already bad for MNI recently but, in January, they got a whole lot worse.  

.  .  .  .  .

But let's get to the real meat... why I'm putting Schemp in the Wall of Shame...

MNI became the worst when Gary "Schemp" Pruitt decided to buy Knight-Ridder, a newspaper company similarly plagued by poor ad sales, with the same non-viable strategy...  Cut costs for $4.5 billion?...

It's true that there was some cost savings to be had, but what Pruitt basically did was to take one sinking ship and tie it to another...   He took two companies facing the exact same problem of ad revenue deterioration... and he put them together...

You can't cost-cut your way out of declining sales...

.  .  .  .  .

Schemp is steering his company straight into oblivion... and if Gary "Schemp" Pruitt had been the captain of the Titanic, that would not have been an accident, hitting that iceberg... 

And yet, the Board just issued a total vote of confidence to the guy...  

Of course, through those writedowns, Gary Pruitt...  I mean, what do you think?  How much do you think he's giving back?  Do you think he's cut his salary?  Maybe he like works for a dollar, right?... 

Low and behold, they paid him $5.6 million in 2006.  That's better than how you did for the rest of your life!...

This stuff - like the nonsense at Washington Mutual (WM), which is down horribly again...  This guy, Gary Pruitt... he's a disgrace, okay... he's just a total disgrace...

I'm calling out all the disgraces in this terrible tape.  These guys should just not make any money.   The market's really painful as it is, but these people are compounding the pain beyond belief...

.  .  .  .  .

The Bottom Line!:      Unless MNI takes some drastic action, like firing Gary "Schemp" Pruitt, and reversing its decision - although you really can't - to buy Knight-Ridder, the bottom line is that McClatchy Co. (MNI) goes much, much lower...  And what do we say about Gary Pruitt?...  "Hey Schemp!  You've got egg all over your face!"  (as Jim pelts the Wall of Shame, and Gary Pruitt's picture, with eggs)...  

.  .  .  .  .