At the end of a story explaning the sale of Knight Ridder’s Northern California newspapers to Dean Singleton’s MediaNews, there was an interesting couple of sentences about what motivates two of the bigger figures in local publishing. The story was in the Hills Newspapers, a group of Knight Ridder weeklies in Alameda County that are an arm of the Contra Costa Times, which McClatchy chairman Gary Pruitt decided to sell. The story said:

Both Singleton and John Armstrong, president of Contra Costa Newspapers and publisher of the Times and Hills, said McClatchy may have erred when it decided to jettison the Contra Costa Newspapers and the Mercury News.

“I want to make McClatchy regret their decision that they didn’t keep us,” Armstrong said.