Yesterday’s NYT has a piece on William Dean Singleton, new owner of (among others) the San Jose Mercury News (and a bidder for the Philly papers).

These days, Mr. Singleton no longer looks at distressed properties. Instead, he is pouring $500 million into new printing presses around the country and building airy newsrooms for his employees.

Indeed, Mr. Singleton intends to make a showcase of The San Jose Mercury News, in the heart of Silicon Valley, as a kind of laboratory for how to meld print with the Web. He is so excited about the prospects that he plans to buy a home in the Bay Area, while keeping his primary residence in Denver.

"All the issues we're dealing with as an industry happened first in San Jose and are more dramatic in San Jose," he said in an interview. "And if you begin to find solutions to the dramatic changes that are going on there, you've found them for all newspapers."