Macleans.ca, the online edition of the Canadian magazine, featured an interview with Star-Bulletin owner David Black this week.

Black is portrayed as a discriminating buyer of newspapers at bargain prices, although swimming against a strong tide of financial analyst opinions, which tend to rate the newspaper industry as a sector to run away from.

In the interview, Black ticks of a check list for success:

Cater to the community, reader and advertiser alike. Keep your costs down, your debt manageable, and your presses running 24 hours a day, printing any job your sales team can find. Resist feeding your ego by buying prestige newspaper properties or by expanding outside your comfort zone into television or radio stations. Don’t chase ridiculous profit margins to appease shareholders. In fact, it’s best not to have any shareholders at all.

It’s the lack of shareholders that is a key to his business model.

Private ownership is key to Black’s success—allowing him the flexibility that most of Canada’s major dailies can only dream about. While the stock value of public companies depends on profits, Black keeps his company just slightly above break-even to minimize his tax bill. He pays himself a salary but has always avoided skimming off the cream. “For every two papers we’ve got that are making money, we want to have one in the incubator that’s losing money so, effectively, that reduces the taxes we pay. And you build value.”

The path out of recession is easier for small papers, he says. Hard times have chopped essential local retail advertising, but retail is also the first to rebound after a recession, he says from experience. “You have to keep people coming into your shop.”

Black counts himself lucky to not have followed down the path of “convergence” of print and broadcast media.

“TV and radio guys have been fragmented all to rat s–t,” Black says. “There are so many signals coming in, so many specialty channels.” Computer use also eats into network viewership. As for papers, between print and Internet editions, they have more readers than ever. “Newspapers,” says Black, “are in a better position than ever to compete with other media that carry retail advertising.”

It’s all decidedly upbeat, although at one point Black admits that he’s betting the house on the viability of newspapers, and he won’t really know whether he’s beaten the odds until the recession ends.

Anyway, it’s a good read.

Here are a couple of other things to check out over the long weekend.

Data.gov is a new federal site devoted to making government data more accessible to the public.

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.

As a priority Open Government Initiative for President Obama’s administration, Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets. The data catalogs will continue to grow as datasets are added. Federal, Executive Branch data are included in the first version of Data.gov.

Looking for background about Data.gov led me to Nextgov.com, a news site focusing on technology and government, and ResourceShelf.com, a blog for journalists and info professionals.

And, finally, political types might want to check out the web site of the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, billed as “California’s nonpartisan fiscal and policy advisor”. This is the place for everything you want to know (and a lot of stuff you didn’t know you needed) about the state’s budget.

Finally, to add a little cheer to your weekend, check out this little video of Ms. Sally, one of two lucky cats adopted by friends of ours.