I haven’t written about newspapers for a long time. (I’ve been stuck in coder mode for almost a year.) But the recent sale of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is big news.

Amidst all the coverage and commentary, I like this small line in Nick Coleman’s rant against his old owners.

[With the sale,] McClatchy leaves Minnesota’s newspapers weakened and in the hands of companies with no local ties.

Coleman’s concern is not just because the Avista Capital Partners owns more oil rigs than newspapers; the lack of local ownsership may be the deciding factor in the death of the traditional newspaper. That’s because local owners share in the fate of their communities. Remote corporate owners do not.

There is a large and cynical part of me that views the recent Yahoo! / Newspaper Consortium deal as the first crash of a host of oncoming waves that will drown the traditional role of the local newspaper. Getting into bed with Yahoo! makes some financial sense (which I can’t go into, since my employer is looking at joining up). But, taken to a logical extreme, it paves the way for the newspaper outlets to become local distribution points for Yahoo! more than it makes Yahoo! a global distribution point for newspapers.

What does that have to do with the sale of the Strib? Well, the devaluation indicated by the almost $700M dollar reduction in price in the 8 years since McClatchy bought the paper. Writing for the AP, Jonathan Freed reports:

McClatchy sold its largest newspaper in part because it can take a tax loss, and because the newspaper’s growth had tapered off, said Chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt.

Newspapers, in large part, succeed based on their relationships to the people they cover and the communities they serve. Part of the decline of newspapers is the disconnection that many Americans (myself included) feel for the places they live (the oft-cited Bowling Alone phenomenon. Distant ownership makes the disconnect bi-directional: now the owners have no roots in the community either.

If the readers think that, then they are likely not to trust the ‘local’ newspaper to look after local interests. At Morris (and I’m writing from corporate HQ), we get complaints like that frequently.

And the news business — even the new online news business — is really built on reader trust.