Wanna buy a paper?

North America's major newspaper chains are shaking things up a bit. Two of the biggies -- Thomson Corp. and The New York Times Co. -- recently announced plans to sell a total of 137 newspapers. The lion's share -- 130 papers in U.S. and Canada -- were put on the block by Thomson. The corporation decided to unload all but its flagship, the Toronto Globe and Mail, in order to concentrate on the Internet. "We see the Internet as the next platform of the future,'' Thomson president and CEO Richard J. Harrington told The Wall Street Journal, "so all our major business-development initiatives are moving toward Internet-based products and services." In other words, "old media" is old news. Is Thomson's decision the first of others to come? The Internet apparently isn't a factor in the NYT sale. Company officials say they've decided to put seven of the chain's smaller papers on the market so that they can focus on its larger papers. The chain recently bought the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the third biggest paper in Massachusetts. The question is, of course, who's going to buy all of these papers? Will any independents emerge from the bunch, or will ownership shift to other chains such as Gannett? (Thomson officials mention the publisher of USA Today as the the top potential purchaser of their papers.) For more on newspaper ownership, visit the Columbia Journalism Review's recent piece, "Who Owns What," at http://www.cjr.org/owners/ You can read NYT's press release about its decision at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/000225/ny_the_ne...

The NYT Co. Web site is located at http://www.nytco.com

For Reuters coverage of Thomson's sale, visit http://live.altavista.com/scripts/editor... The Thomson Web site is at http://www.thomson.com

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