Newspaper publisher Knight-Ridder Inc of Miami has emerged as the buyer for Lockheed Corp’s world famous Dialog Information Services Inc database business. When the Calabasas, California company put Dialog on the block, it was expected to fetch about $200m (CI No 923), but Lockheed has done much better than that, winning $353m for the business, which did $9.2m in profit on turnover of $98.1m last year. Dialog offers data from over 320 databases to over 91,000 subscribers in 86 countries. Its acquisition doubles the size of Knight-Ridder’s Business Information Services Division, which lost $1m on turnover of $99m last year. Dialog includes the DialNet international communications network, serving London, Tokyo and 53 North American cities, the DialMail electronic mail service, and Dialog OnDisc, putting databases on Compact Disk. Knight-Ridder’s own services include the Viewtext database of its 34 US daily newspapers.
