Hearst owned The San Francisco Examiner for more than a century, but the rival Chronicle became the city's dominant paper.
It could -- could -- mean the city's first economic boost since the dominant paper mill closed a generation ago.
The Times, published since 1982, has long billed itself as a scrappy ideological counterweight to The Post, Washington's dominant paper.
Indeed, CanWest's grip extends across the country: in most big cities it owns at least the dominant paper and one of the top television stations.
Advance Publications said last fall that it might shut down The Star-Ledger, the dominant paper in New Jersey, but a set of cutbacks and union concessions kept the paper alive in much-downsized form.
"Middle Israel" reads Maariv, which is declining; Israel Hayom, a free tabloid that is owned by the right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; and Yedioth Ahronoth, which is owned by the Mozes family and is the dominant paper in the country.
Phil's greatest successes were in business: buying and absorbing the Times-Herald in 1954, purchasing Newsweek (for a song) in 1961, and making inroads against the dominant paper in town, the Evening Star (which folded in 1981).
New Jersey business and political leaders protested that it would be a severe blow to lose the state's dominant paper, whose weekday circulation of 345,000 ranks 15th in the country.
City Pages eventually became the dominant paper — in part because it was very good and run by smart people — and when, yes, Village Voice Media decided to enter the market, it bought both papers and closed The Twin Cities Reader.
The Times may do better than some, but given New York City's high poverty rate and The Times's special responsibility as the nation's dominant paper, with the most plentiful resources, there should be more.
