Post-Dispatch coverage of beer deal called thorough and exhaustive

Kenneth Klee of The Daily Deal applauds the coverage of InBev’s proposed deal with Anheuser-Busch that appeared in the hometown paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Klee writes, “It’s one thing to work at a bank or a multinational corporation or a financial media company and advocate global free trade. It’s another to be a truck driver for Anheuser-Busch Cos. in St. Louis and hear that a foreign giant with a weird name is taking over your employer. How do you make sense of something like that?

“One way is by reading the smart, thorough, fair-minded and exhaustive coverage of this deal in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This account of InBev SA CEO Carlos Brito’s meeting with A-B executives on Tuesday is just the latest example. As you’ll see, there are links to many other articles, from a profile of Brito to a look at what happened after other major local companies were bought by outsiders to pieces on employee reactions and the impact on the regional economy. This is a level of coverage that simply doesn’t happen anywhere else.

“And judging from trends in the newspaper industry, it’s in danger of disappearing. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is owned by Lee Enterprises of Davenport, Iowa, which bought parent Pulitzer Inc. in 2005 for $1.46 billion. At the time Lee — with 44 papers in smaller markets and the kind of hyper-local strategy that many think is the industry’s best hope — looked like a possible winner. But as of Wednesday, Lee’s shares were below a 27-year low, and the market cap for the whole company was $152 million.”

Read more here.