This newspaper might be sold. So? What could that mean to you?

In 1885, 13 years before The Virginian-Pilot first published, The Saturday Evening Post wrote: "Some things never change."

And some things do.

As the family dynasties that once controlled the nation's best newspapers enter their third, fourth and fifth generations, more are selling to corporations. The passion for great journalism - the kind synonymous with Watergate and the Pentagon Papers - is not always inherited. Most newspapers are still profitable but the margins have dropped, and news coverage has been sacrificed in some cases as shareholders demand more attention to the bottom line.

As family-held newspapers are bought out, more changes than just the owner. Content, depth of coverage and staffing all change as well. Some industry observers say the same may be in store for The Pilot, if the Batten family sells it along with the rest of Landmark Communications, although a look at recently sold newspapers around the country produces mixed results.

The Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer fared well after its sale by the Daniels family to The McClatchy Co. Some former staffers say the Philadelphia papers - once Knight Ridder properties - have improved in some ways after a group of local businessmen bought them. But the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News - once owned by the Ridder family, later by Knight Ridder - and smaller papers in that area have seen their staffs cut drastically, followed by, some say, an accompanying drop in quality.

"The quality that Landmark and Frank Batten Sr. insisted on in his newspapers will probably be diminished," John McManus, a San Jose State University journalism lecturer and former Norfolk reporter, said. "He always cared about the quality of the papers. He read them. It mattered to him the way it probably would not matter to a distant owner."

McManus is director of Grade the News, a consumer report on journalism around San Francisco. He watched as the once-esteemed Mercury News and many smaller papers that ring the Bay area were bought by William Dean Singleton of MediaNews Group in 2006.

Staffing was reduced by about half, there have been more mistakes in the paper, and salaries are low, leading to staff turnover, according to McManus.

"That doesn't bother Dean Singleton, because he's not concerned with the quality of the paper," McManus said. "He has a monopoly. There's no competition."

Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, said The Pilot could gain or lose quality after a sale.

"It all depends on who the buyer is," he said. "You might have a wonderful, enlightened, committed buyer, but probably in the majority of these transactions, it turns out to be somebody who's harder-headed about expenses, a little less willing to invest in the journalism, trying to serve the community but not with the same level of commitment as the people who live there and care about it."

Under the Battens' ownership, The Pilot was among the papers that aggressively pursued social change and investigative stories, winning two Pulitzer Prizes for its editorial stance against Massive Resistance to school integration and for general news reporting that investigated the spending practices of a Chesapeake public official. The Pilot also won a Pulitzer in 1929.

"What likely will happen, I'm sad to say, it's very likely the newsroom will be stripped of many of its resources," McManus predicted. "Reporters will be laid off, editors will be let go, especially the more experienced people who are paid more.

"You see newspapers that were once pretty proud now operating with half their staff and acting like papers that are much smaller," he said. "Lots of human interest stories on the front page. Stories that don't matter but have buzz. Crime. Anything with a baby being harmed. Stories about animals misbehaving. These are cheap, they don't offend advertisers and they attract an audience that's interested in being entertained for a while."

GradetheNews.org carried a story in October about a report by the California Media Project that said reporting on key state issues was in "serious decline," based on interviews with 62 government and civic leaders, journalists and educators. The interviewees concluded, among other things, that new business models such as nonprofit and philanthropic approaches will be needed to sustain print news.

The St. Petersburg Times in Florida is a model of that approach. The nonprofit Poynter Institute, set up by late owner Nelson Poynter, operates both the highly regarded newspaper and a journalism center, built on his opinion that "there is a direct relationship between excellence and profit."

Not every newspaper sold ends up with distant corporate owners. In the case of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, a consortium of local businessmen led by former public relations executive Brian Tierney bought the papers.

National Public Radio reported that some staffers were skeptical, saying that Tierney, in his P R job, had tried to have stories killed and reporters reassigned for his clients. But when Tierney came aboard the paper, he was quoted as saying that wouldn't happen, and that he had made his partners promise not to interfere with the news.

Former Inquirer ombudsman John V.R. Bull said Tuesday that he and several former colleagues concluded, "The paper has improved. There's no doubt about that. It's far, far, far from its glory days. They've cut the staff enormously, so there is less local news coverage. I guess the bottom line is, in our view, the paper is nowhere as diminished as we had feared."

The paper has dropped all its domestic and foreign bureaus, Bull said, and is more focused on hard news. "What they've lost is depth, and they've lost people who knew how to spell the names of surrounding towns," he said. "Institutional memory is shot."

Linn Washington Jr., a journalism professor at Temple University and a columnist for The Philadelphia Tribune, a paper that serves the black community, said the newspapers' new owners have continued to shift coverage out of the core city to the suburbs in an attempt to build circulation and readership. If newspapers continue their decline, he said, democracy itself is in trouble.

"I think the public wants news," Washington said. "I think the public needs news. No other medium can provide that news in the way that's really needed.

"Bloggers are not journalists," he said. "The reality is that people with some training in journalism, and people who have a commitment to the fundamental values of journalism and the role that journalism plays in our democracy, that's terribly important."

Local owners care more for their communities, Washington said, and provide a platform for a diversity of views, which the Founding Fathers wrote into the First Amendment.

"We have such a homogenization of viewpoint expression, in part because of the increasing concentration of ownership of media," he said. "That's not going to be good for our democracy."

When The News & Observer of Raleigh was sold to McClatchy in 1995, its staff had some fears. But that media company basically changed nothing, said public editor Ted Vaden: "Overall, the experience was positive."

The biggest difference, said Andy Bechtel, former staffer turned journalism teacher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was not seeing the top executives on a regular basis. McClatchy executives, based in Sacramento, Calif., would visit once or twice a year, and they were very supportive, Bechtel said. "But there's a difference when you see someone once or twice a year, and someone once a week at the snack bar."

Former Durham City Councilman Frank Hyman, a regular newspaper reader and guest columnist for several news outlets, said The News & Observer didn't change much after McClatchy took over. But family-owned Durham's Herald-Sun, after being bought by Kentucky-based Paxton Media Group in 2004, had "massive layoffs," according to The Associated Press. Hyman said the paper carries fewer stories now, and is less involved in the community.

In Minneapolis, where the Star Tribune has been sold twice since 1998, projects editor Laurie Hertzel said the newspaper used to cover stories in the Dakotas, Montana and Wisconsin, but the coverage is now more focused on Minnesota.

The paper now puts more local, pop culture and "quirky" stories on its front page. Some staffers and readers have complained that the quality has dropped because there's less world and national news displayed, but, Hertzel said, "I think these changes would have happened regardless, and that it's more a shift in coverage than it is diminishing what we do."

News is intangible but still important to society, McManus said.

"It's not like bread, although it is as important to the health of a community as bread is to the health of a human," he said. "It really is a staple. I would argue that the value of news is increasing and that's because news, by definition, is about change. News from farther away from our local communities is more important, as we learned with 9/11 and the global economy.

"The stripped-down newsroom has to rewrite press releases because they can't afford to do independent reporting. That means the viewpoint of the powerful becomes dominant. The public will, I think, eventually wake up to what it's lost, but probably not until things have gotten fairly desperate." 

Staff writer Denise Watson Batts contributed to this report.

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com