Sovereign wealth funds to look at buying newspapers?

With a growing number of newspapers on the market at a time they most likely will fetch historically low prices, somebody is going to start buying some of them. But don't count on the usual suspects. Start thinking, instead, about such unconventional potential purchasers as the multibillion-dollar investment funds created by countries like Singapore or the sheikhdoms of the United Arab Emirates. For considerably less than $1 billion of the up to $800 billion in its coffers, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council could buy the Newark Star-Ledger, Chicago Sun-Times and San Diego Union and turn them into U.S. editions of The National, the new English-language paper launched in the spring by the state-owned Abu Dhabi Media Co. [newsosaur.blogspot.com]