Could the Pioneer Press buy the Star Tribune?

Dean Singleton, the owner of the Media News Group (the Denver-based company that bought the Pioneer Press after Knight Ridder dissolved) has made a career of buying papers in crisis, gutting their staffs, and then cracking the whip. It's publish or perish.

It's a strategy that has supposedly made Singleton a multi-millionaire. Or is that billionaire?

For years, the talk was that the Star Tribune would oneday absorb the Pioneer Press, a stalwart underdog in one of the last great media rivalries in the United States of America.

But if the Avista Corp., which bought the Star Tribune not long ago and has no great love of media holdings, is doing as poorly financially as it claims to be, perhaps things could go the other way around?

City Pages ponders the possibility and dishes on the Star Tribune's meager finances here, as the New York Post did before it:

City Pages article on the Star Tribune

Singleton could, in theory, ride in and buy the Star Tribune, and either merge the two papers or create a joint operating agreement of sorts. Shared content. Shared printing presses. But separate identities, each capitalizing on the loyal fan base for each paper in each city.

A group of eight rival newspapers in Ohio just did something along a similar vein here, sharing content between them as an answer to the Associated Press rate hike:

More on the operating agreement-style parternship here:
Ohio papers share content