Investor says Strib, PiPress are good investments — for a one-paper town

Finally. After making a few newspaper deathwatch lists, the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press are on a top-10 list they’d likely want to be on: Silicon Valley Insider’s “10 Newspapers That Will Survive The Apocalypse.” The list was created after talking to a media investor who remains unnamed “because many of those deals remain under non-disclosure agreements.” He thinks that after newspapers streamline their news operations and stop “spending on trying to find their way out,” a few papers will remain good investments. What he’d do: buy up the Twin Cities dailies, combine them as one paper and raise ad and subscription prices:

The twin cities are a “good market” with “good demos,” says our investor source. The idea here would be to wait for the Star-Tribune to come out of bankruptcy, snatch the Pioneer Press from Media News and then combine the papers and “get rid of a huge amount of costs in the comination, pulling employees and warm bodies.”

Our buyer says after combining the two, he’d raise subscription and ad rates.

For anyone keeping track, a combined Star Tribune Pioneer Press would effectively represent the consolidation of at least five historical metro-area papers into one edition: The Minneapolis Star, the Tribune and the Minneapolis Journal and the Minnesota Pioneer and the St. Paul Dispatch. (According to this account, the Minneapolis Tribune was created by the 1867 consolidation of two other papers, The State Atlas and The Chronicle, so make that six.)