Could be a bad buy or a good buy. I think the good buy angles come if he can help ensure that all those local newspapers make sure to get a web/mobile foothold. Combine the best of both worlds: the boots on pavement and faces-in-faces they already have, and the focus on the local communities and culture, combined with making their content available both in newsprint AND on desktop web and on mobile web. It'd be relatively cheap to build and operate a per-newspaper website these days, especially at the kind of traffic levels those newspapers would likely have. Salaries for news staff and the cost of print operations would prob be so much higher the web/mobile parts would be just noise in the cost structure.
I live in a small market served by one of the papers involved. Their website is the hub for local and state news in a way that simply doesn't compare with a large market.
One of the changes to the newspaper business is that I can get national and international stories from the NYT or Post at no cost and at my leisure. Big story reporting has become commoditized.
What has value is news that I can't get anywhere else and which is likely to effect people I know personally - like school board decisions or changes to the speed limit on local road or the city council considering the milage rate.
