Buy newspapers in small, monopoly markets. Run them cheap. Make high margins.

More than one Black has taken that path to success. The latest? David Black. But he's also training his guns on metro papers now.

From the July 27 Globe and Mail:

In March, with Mr. Black on board as an investor and adviser, Platinum Equity bought The San Diego Union-Tribune, a 141-year-old paper where advertising revenue had fallen 40 per cent in the past three years as the southern California city was ravaged by the burst real estate bubble and battered by recession.

It is here David Black sees a future for newspapers. He believes in an old-fashioned recipe, that a local paper has a unique role for advertisers, especially the likes of furniture stores and auto dealerships. There is still value in a full-page ad, even for beaten-down city papers. When the economy comes back, papers will get back on their feet too, the idea goes.

Mr. Black and Platinum don't have dreams of editorial expansion. Mr. Black's papers are mostly of the decidedly no-frill variety, and, in one example, there are no plans to resurrect the Union-Tribune's Washington bureau, which was shuttered last year. “In a perfect world, you have bureaus in several places but that perfect world isn't going to happen, I don't believe, where you have money to burn in editorial,” Mr. Black said in an interview.

The 63-year-old isn't so much a newspaper man as a businessman running newspapers. Making money is the challenge he relishes, and he continues to make it when many others in the industry are failing. ...

Mr. Black's belief in the business is unshaken. This is a business cycle, severe, but not a whole new world, he said, particularly for community/suburban papers and small-town publications that make up Black Press, businesses that are better insulated from digital media. As for large urban dailies, he believes their costs are too high, given that websites such as Craigslist.com have gutted classified ad revenues.

“The Internet no doubt has had an effect, and will have an effect, for community papers, but I don't think it's an enormous effect,” Mr. Black said. “Community newspapers are still the best place for retailers to advertise. They get the most response for their dollars.

“For the big metros, it's different. They were living off their classifieds. They have to reinvent themselves....

While Mr. Black does see better prospects at smaller papers, he is interested in larger ones, too. “I'm fairly agnostic [about size],” he says.

“Where there are opportunities, there are opportunities.”