Knight, John S.

John S. Knight, in full John Shively Knight, (born October 26, 1894, Bluefield, West Virginia, U.S.—died June 16, 1981, Akron, Ohio), widely respected American journalist and publisher who developed Knight Newspapers, one of the major newspaper chains in the United States.

Knight’s father moved to Akron, Ohio, to become advertising manager of the Akron Beacon Journal, a daily newspaper that he came to control some 15 years later. The younger Knight worked at the paper in summers as a youth. He was educated in Akron and at a private school in Maryland. His college education at Cornell University was interrupted by World War I. After front-line army service in France, he was reluctant to enter journalism, but in 1920 he acceded to his father’s wish and started as a sports reporter for the Beacon Journal, adopting a pseudonym because he was embarrassed at the poor quality of his work. In time he improved it beyond question; even when he was an eminent publisher later in life, the quality of his occasional reporting was admired. Knight became the managing editor of the paper in 1925.

When his father died in 1933, Knight took over as publisher and built on his father’s foundation. He became a prizewinning editorial writer and an acquisitive publisher. Among the papers that he bought were The Miami Herald (1937), the Detroit Free Press (1940), the Chicago Daily News (1944), and The Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer (1954). Knight sold the Chicago Daily News to Marshall Field in 1959, but even without it Knight Newspapers had a combined circulation of more than one million in 1960. The Ridder newspaper chain and Knight Newspapers merged in 1974 to form the Knight Ridder Newspapers group (later renamed Knight Ridder, Inc.). Other papers owned by the group include The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Kansas City Star, the San Jose Mercury News, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. By the early 21st century Knight Ridder newspapers had won more than 80 Pulitzer Prizes.