The foundation shelved the study, which it has not made public, after a group of local business people bought the paper, because it did not want to appear to be competing with the new owners, Ms. Rimel says. But she remains deeply concerned about the state of the nation's newspapers and has agreed to serve on the board of ProPublica, the new investigative-reporting project.
"Everybody from the Founding Fathers on have said we need a free, robust press, and a market failure in journalism is a deep public-policy problem," she says.