People don't care who owns the weekly barrel of ink, as long as it gets spilled in ways that allow them to be intelligent consumers of their respective civic cultures. That's why when pet-products king Leonard Stern announced that he was selling his seven weeklies in various markets around the country -- including industry flagships like the Village Voice and L.A. Weekly -- it didn't merit much more than a blip inside most daily papers. But within the industry, the move was viewed with seismic portend.

E-mails crisscrossed through alternative newsrooms all over the country, with the requisite chatter about this being a "dark day" for the industry. Oh, really? A pet products company -- Hartz Mountain -- fills its shopping cart with start-ups and going concerns in Cleveland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Orange County, Calif., and Long Island, N.Y., over a period of years. Then it notices there's a lot of stupid money out there and decides to dump its properties while the getting is good. It's good old fashioned American business, writ large over what used to be a bunch of grubby upstart rags but that are now increasingly in the habit of rigorously covering pressing lifestyle issues like finding the best gym to work out in. Where's the tragedy?

The papers in question include two of the best known in the industry (the Village Voice and the L.A. Weekly) and five others, either suburban offshoots of the flagship papers or recently purchased titles in the hinterlands: the Long Island Voice, the Orange County Weekly, the Seattle Weekly, the Minneapolis City Pages and the Cleveland Free Times.

The chicken-littling comes from worries about exactly what sort of golem of evil will come riding over the horizon and pony up the $150 million to $200 million for a company that claims $80 million in annual revenues. Could it be New Times, a chain of 10 brawling weeklies, mostly in the West and South? The company has a big appetite -- it's been scrapping with Stern for papers for much of the last three or four years -- but maybe not that much stupid money. Or will a large daily chain decide to stop banging its head on the wall trying to catch the attention of rich young audiences and just buy a place at the table instead? Just a few years ago, daily ownership was the industry bugaboo. Now, in this sudden age of ceaseless vertical and horizontal integration, there's a new bogeyman: Could a daily publishing company use a weekly's street cred as jewelry to hang on its local portals?

If it's a dark day, it's not the first. Times Mirror, which is mentioned among current suitors of the Stern holdings, paid $17.5 million last April for New Mass Media, a Connecticut chain of five alternative weeklies led by the Hartford Advocate. The company also owns the Hartford Courant, a daily that the Advocate continues nominally to compete with. The sky did not fall. Last summer, there was a movement at the convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies to kick the New Mass Media papers out of the association because of their new affiliation with the dark side. The effort failed, in part because people in the industry have begun to see that opposing daily co-option of their respective franchises is congruent with the industry's squishy lefty traditions, but doesn't comport with the behavior of the invisible hand. Mass media will continue to, well, mass.

David Schneiderman, president of Stern Publishing, wasn't publicly ruling out any buyers. (Although he did privately tell his staff that there would be no deal with New Times. A New Times source said that the company will be in the mix and "Stern will sell to the highest bidder, period." Right now, the two companies compete directly in Los Angeles, where the tiny New Times Los Angeles goes up against the very large L.A. Weekly, and in Cleveland, where Stern's Free Times is in a weekly jihad with the Scene of New Times.)

"I don't have any great problem with a daily newspaper company if they are willing to leave the papers alone and finance good journalism by continuing to write the checks ... I think you will see some interesting players coming out of the woodwork," Schneiderman says. Stern is selling, according to Schneiderman, because none of his children are interested in spending their careers driving the bright shiny little media company he has assembled.

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