Star Tribune publisher must step down, judge says

09/18/2007

Ramsey County Judge David Higgs deliberated for three months on whether confidential revenue and advertising data Ridder brought to the Star Tribune would cause the Pioneer Press irreparable harm.


By Matt McKinney,
Star Tribune
September 18, 2007


A Ramsey County judge ruled today that Star Tribune publisher Par Ridder must step down from his job for taking confidential financial information from his former employer, the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Judge David C. Higgs, in a ruling marked by pointed criticisms of Ridder's behavior, said Ridder violated his "common law duty of confidentiality."Given Ridder's past conduct and his cavalier attitude toward his use and disclosure of confidential Pioneer Press information, it seems to the court that his past actual misappropriation is a good indicator of possible future misappropriation or use of confidential Pioneer Press information," Higgs ruled.

The judge cleared Ridder and one other executive he hired away from the Pioneer Press of charges that they broke their noncompete agreements, saying the agreements for Ridder and Kevin Desmond, now the Star Tribune's vice president of operations, were not valid.

Higgs ruled against a third executive who Ridder hired away from the Pioneer Press, Jennifer Parratt, saying that she violated a valid noncompete agreement when she left St. Paul to become the Star Tribune's director of niche publications. She cannot work for the paper until April 19, 2008 at the earliest, he said.

The ruling bars Ridder from his office for one year starting today, a move that lawyers for the Pioneer Press had argued was necessary to prevent further damage to their business. Ridder left the Star Tribune at 8:40 a.m., according to Star Tribune spokesman Ben Taylor.

Ridder will be replaced by Chris Harte, the chairman of the Star Tribune company and a former newspaper publisher of Knight Ridder newspapers in Akron, Ohio and State College, Penn., and the Guy Gannett Company newspaper in Portland, Maine.

"Today's ruling is clearly not what we expected," Harte said in a company wide e-mail sent shortly after the ruling came out. "While we strongly disagree with this ruling, we will of course abide by the court's decision as we evaluate our legal options."

The ruling is a significant victory for Dean Singleton, the vice chairman of MediaNews Group Inc., owner of the Pioneer Press. Singleton, who sat in the courtroom as Ridder testified during the June temporary injunction hearing, was personally incensed by Ridder's actions.

"It's never happened before in newspapering," he told a reporter during the hearings. "And it's wrong. It's just wrong." He was not immediately available for comment.

Ridder was the sixth in his family to run the Pioneer Press when he became publisher in 2004. He was hired by the Star Tribune on March 5, three days after he notified his bosses in St. Paul that he was leaving. The departure at first seemed amicable, with Singleton saying he wished Ridder well.

Within days, things changed.

Ridder had taken his St. Paul Pioneer Press laptop with him when he went across the river, and the laptop was loaded with numbers: budgets, custom advertising rates, reports on company expenses and more.

He returned the laptop the same day he started at the Star Tribune when the Pioneer Press discovered it missing, but not until an unnamed Star Tribune employee had copied the contents onto a portable hard drive. Ridder said in court that he later shared some of that information with two Star Tribune senior executives, Mike LaBonia and Michael Riggs, but only to show them the format of the spreadsheets, which he expected them to adopt for future reports.

The bottom line, he argued in court, was that he never used the information to harm the Pioneer Press.

Shortly after he left St. Paul, Ridder began contacting senior executives at the Pioneer Press, apparently to sound them out for job offers at the Star Tribune, and hired Parratt and Desmond. Desmond, who had also been sued for violated a non-compete agreement, can stay, the judge ruled.

Those hires, along with the laptop computer and the release of Pioneer Press information within the Star Tribune, were the basis for a 46-page civil lawsuit against Ridder, the Star Tribune, Avista, Parratt, Desmond, LaBonia and Riggs.

LaBonia, the Star Tribune's advertising director, announced his resignation from the paper last week. He will become senior vice president of advertising for the San Francisco Chronicle. Star Tribune CFO Riggs, meanwhile, left the paper in July to become a senior vice president at Meredith Corp. in Des Moines, Iowa.

If the lawsuit was a call to arms for the Pioneer Press -- in a meeting there on the day the lawsuit was filed union leaders wondered aloud why criminal charges weren't filed -- it was downplayed by Ridder, who generally avoided comments to the press, saying only that he and the others named in the suit would prevail.

In May he bought a $2.73 million dollar home on Lake of the Isles and as recently as last week had a series of staff meetings to unveil a new zoning strategy that he planned to launch Oct. 3. The plan would replace weekly Wednesday suburban sections with five zoned metro sections five days a week.

Editor Nancy Barnes set a company wide e-mail Tuesday morning praising the staff for working through the turmoil.

"It's hard to imagine a more tumultuous year, even without today's ruling," she said. "One thing's for sure: It's more important than ever that we cover the news, even when it's about ourselves, and put out a great paper."