Newspapers

ST. LOUIS - Shares of Pulitzer Inc., owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and 78 other newspapers, rose more than 17 percent after the company said it's considering a sale. The company may sell for as much as $1.5 billion, and Gannett Co., the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, could be a leading candidate to buy it, said Barry L. Lucas, an analyst with Gabelli & Co., which owns Gannett shares. Pulitzer's 14 daily and 65 weekly newspapers are located primarily in mid-size and small U.S. cities such as Bloomington, Ill., and Provo, Utah, which makes the company attractive to a range of suitors, said Lucas.

That the media -- defined broadly as including everything from television, radio and the Internet to compact discs, cell phones and video games -- engulf us every day is hardly news. That American journalism is in a state of flux and undergoing historic change also is hardly news. However, the significance and impact of each of these cultural truths is news and is the subject of two new books, both worth reading. One is written by a prominent intellectual and the other by two top editors of The Washington Post.

- June Sawyers, Tribune Newspapers

Milwaukee newspapers mergingThe Milwaukee Journal, one of the nation's largest remaining afternoon newspapers, will merge with its morning counterpart, the Milwaukee Sentinel, April 1 and publish as a morning paper, the papers' owner announced Tuesday. The combined newspaper will be named the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.The move reflects rising newspaper production costs, primarily the cost of newsprint, as well as consumers' preference for reading morning newspapers over afternoon newspapers.

We are in the process of changing the size of our newspapers in order to be more efficient. As we adjust our presses, the left and right margins will be slightly larger on some newspapers. We trust that you will find the new size more portable and easier to use. Thank you for reading The Baltimore Sun.

The Sun's daily circulation rose slightly during the six months that ended March 31, bucking a trend of continued falling circulation at most major metropolitan newspapers, according to industry numbers released yesterday. It was the first daily circulation gain in 41/2 years for The Sun. The newspaper's paid daily circulation for Monday through Friday averaged 232,360, up from 232,138, a 0.1 percent gain, The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported. That was in contrast to an industrywide decline of about 3.5 percent, according to an analysis of the ABC's numbers by trade journal Editor & Publisher.

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau plans to issue an apology on his Web site late tonight to anyone who might be offended by tomorrow's Doonesbury comic strip, which due to "poor timing" features the image of a man's head on a platter. Trudeau drew the strip in April, before the beheading of an American citizen, Nicholas Berg, in Iraq, a videotape of which was posted on a Web site on May 11. Doonesbury's distributor, Universal Press Syndicate, alerted newspapers on May 14, but many newspapers, including The Sun, had already printed the comic sections that will be distributed in tomorrow's editions.

TORONTO -- Thomson Corp. said yesterday that it will sell all of its newspapers except its flagship Globe & Mail to focus on legal, financial and other Internet-related units. Shares were up 12 percent, their biggest gain in a year. Thomson publishes 130 newspapers, including two in Maryland: the Cumberland Times-News and the Daily Times in Salisbury. It also provides about 400 specialty information products and services in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Excluding the Globe & Mail, published in Toronto, the newspaper unit accounted for $810 million of the parent company's roughly $6 billion in revenue last year.

I teach at a high school where the kids are bright, well-informed and politically astute. But most of them think that a newspaper is something you use to clean up after a dog or put beneath an open can of paint. They get most of their news from the Internet or from cable shows such as John Stewart's The Daily Show. This is not altogether a bad thing. For example, this fall I will write college recommendations for about 10 seniors. One of them is an avid reader of the newspaper, but she rarely reads the printed version.