A color photo showed Frank Daniels III briefing his staff. What really caught my eye, however, was a revelation that I saw later in the _New York Times_: “Frank Daniels III said he was convinced that the paper needed to find a larger parent in part to give the paper the resources necessary to nurture those new electronic efforts.” More than a few of us newspaper junkies had hoped that the new technology would help keep the _N & O_ local. I recalled one reason why Daniels had not dumped his _N & O_ stock in the 1980s in favor of an investment in an online service. “The relationship between a newspaper and a community,” he had said, “has such a richness and history that communities shouldn’t lose that.” Now, however, after 101 years in the Daniels family, the _N & O_ and trimmings were going to a California chain for $373 million. The buyer was McClatchy Newspapers Inc., the former employer of George Schlukbier, the Daniels’s new-media guru. No wicked corporate conspiracies existed here. The Danielses simply felt comfortable with McClatchy, which not only shared the _N & O_’s still basically liberal politics but also enjoyed a good reputation in the newspaper business. Run out of Sacramento, McClatchy Newspapers was a family-owned chain with just twelve dailies. It allowed much more leeway to local editors than many others did, and I might well have reacted just as the Daniels family did when the McClatchy people came calling. The _N & O_ mustn’t end up in the hands of some skinflint chain; McClatchy Newspapers could be an excellent alternative. Still, the sale did not delight me. The Net, after all, was supposed to be good for small guys, including, presumably, family-owned enterprises. Josephus Daniels had bought the _N & O_ at that bankruptcy auction in 1894, seen it through the Roaring Twenties, the stockmarket crash, and the heyday of his friend FDR. He must have died thinking that the Daniels name would forever grace the masthead. From a portrait in the boardroom, he looked out at his progeny announcing the transaction. Just why couldn’t all the computers and cables and videocams have helped strengthen the family business, not force its sale? I could see how the latter may have happened. The Daniels had had to invest in both the printing press and the new med_ia_, with an emphasis on the plural. A story on newsprint, an Internet audio, and a video would cost more than just an old-fashioned version. Network-related expenses of the _N & O_ may have been smaller than the investment in new press, but they would only grow in the future. No-frills Web areas cost next to nothing to set up. But net.papers with the very flashiest graphics and full-motion video would need programmers and designers and other specialists, not all of them cheap. At the same time the Daniels wanted to cover their circulation area well, and that meant a big, expensive staff of reporters, too.