Knight-Ridder, the U.S.'s second-largest newspaper chain, goes on the block today. And its selling price could say much about what the smart-money people think about the future of the mainstream news media.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

Analysts said any bid over $65 a share would probably be accepted; anything less would put the company in a quandary. If Knight Ridder were unhappy with the offers, it might drop the sale and buy back more of its own stock in an attempt to revive its share price and provide its shareholders with a special dividend.

Whatever the outcome, the process portends a stringent climate for those toiling away at Knight Ridder.

"The bottom line on Knight Ridder papers is that in order to make these deals work, someone has to get extremely aggressive with costs," said Frederick W. Searby, an analyst with J. P. Morgan. "There's no question that this means that any buyer has to go in with a very, very sharp knife and trim the fat and maybe into the muscles to get this to work."

At the same time, bids that Knight Ridder considered too low could send a further message of worry through an industry already on the defensive.

"It will be very negative," Mr. Searby said. "Given the easy money out there, if these kind of prime assets can't get taken, it will rattle a lot of investors and depress sentiment."

James M. Naughton, a former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and retired president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, was less certain of the ramifications, especially if no deal were made.

"My concern is that it will be considered a referendum on the news business rather than an acknowledgment of what it really is — the failure of Knight Ridder many years ago to protect itself in the way it organized its stock," he said, referring to the company having only a single class of stock, making it more vulnerable to takeovers.

"I don't know that it speaks to the wider issue of whether there is money to be made in newspapers because the answer is yes, a lot," Mr. Naughton said. But Knight Ridder, he said, "is more apt to be under pressure from investors and therefore more apt to do bad things to its newsrooms to try to protect itself."