Still, it's another Murdoch-MySpace style buyout: A traditional media company snapping up what it describes as a "profitable, established platform to expand our digital efforts, especially in the rapidly growing areas of health and women's interests." iVillage has blogs, members, interactivity - in other words, it hits all the right buttons for a company hoping to expand its offering. Unlike the funny money swishing around in 1999, NBC bought a profitable company - though $600 million is still a staggering sum for a website.

Meanwhile, the USA's second biggest newspaper chain Knight Ridder is still looking for a buyer. Though reports say that it could be snapped up any day, several suitors have already considered bids but dropped out.

The sale has worrying implications for journalists on the company's 32 daily titles. If Knight Ridder can't find a buyer, it might have to buy back its stock to revive the share price - and then introduce severe cost-cutting measures to make its business run trimly afterwards. Even if a buyer is found, the buyer is likely to slim down the company substantially.

One commentator told the New York Times that he feared the sale would become a "referendum on the news business."

"Low bids would suggest pessimism about the prospects for newspapers, as readers and advertisers increasingly decamp to the Internet. High bids would indicate more optimism for their future," reports the New York Times.

If that's the case, then industry buyers appear to believe the newspaper business is dwindling - despite the fact that Knight Ridder makes a decent profit margin of 19.3 percent.

What's odd is that more isn't made of Knight Ridder's newspaper websites - surely a these portals attract hundreds of thousands of regular readers? One would imagine these sites to be an important asset in their own right, if the media business is currently obsessed with online presence.

Update: The NYT reports that media company McClatchy has emerged as the leading bidder for Knight Ridder. The bid values Knight Ridder at $4.6 billion - McClatchy is set to pay $4.8 billion in cash and stock for the larger company.

Editor & Publisher reports that pundits in the US business are viewing Knight Ridder as "the canary in the coalmine", testing the health of other publishers.

Update 2: McClatchy's bid ended up the only one and has been accepted by Knight Ridder. Reaction is mixed: JD Lasica at New Media Musings gives it the thumbs up, writing that McClatchy is a company that "cares deeply about journalism."

The NYT reports, however, that the fact that the only bidder won indicates a general gloominess among investors regarding the newspaper industry.

McClatchy paid roughly ten times Knight Ridder's cash flow last year, and bought the shares at what the NYT describes as a "premium". But, when "Lee Enterprises acquired Pulitzer Inc. in January 2005, it paid 13 to 14 times cash flow, a considerably richer multiple."

"Not long ago the second-biggest newspaper company in the country would undoubtedly have drawn a fair amount of interest," it reports, "That it did not does not speak well for newspaper companies; their stock prices have already fallen because of the Internet's increasing popularity with readers and advertisers. But the auction, and its meaning for the newspaper industry, could have been worse: at least Knight Ridder found an acceptable offer."

A Harvard Business School analyst also reads mixed signals in the deal, concluding that it was a good thing that the company was bought by another publisher. "That signals that they believe there is inherent underlying value in the stock," said Clark Gilbert, "If no newspaper company had come in, it would have been a worse signal: 'We don't think our own industry has a great future.'"

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