As preliminary bidding began for Knight Ridder, the second-largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., the New York Times quoted UGA journalism professor Conrad Fink about investor expectations: “The rising tide of shareholder expectation has reached unreasonable proportions,” he says. “And the market is panicked about newspaper stock in an unreasonable way…There’s a fear that this is a dying industry, when in fact it’s an industry that has an unrivaled mandate, a franchise, in hundreds of cities across the country and in local news, and it has some of the strongest brand names in the country.”