Advertiser business writer Rick Daysog reported yesterday on a key investor backing the Star-Bulletin’s recently announced purchase of Gannett’s Honolulu Advertiser.

In yesterday’s Advertiser, Daysog identified the investor as Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. of Toronto, which will also name a director to sit on the board of the company formed to operate the new paper that will merge the two Honolulu dailies.

Daysog’s blog, Biz Bites, followed later in the day with additional details.

Daysog’s blog entry had an interesting choice of headline–“The Advertiser’s new investor”.

Technically incorrect, because the investment apparently is in the new venture that will result when the Star-Bulletin and Advertiser are merged.

The problem is that there’s a lot of uncertainty about what kind of newspaper is going to result.

Will it be more like MidWeek and the Star-Bulletin, emphasizing shorter news stories, more features, arts, and photos? How short-staffed will the newsroom be? In prior deals, Black has started by slashing newsroom jobs and budgets. Will that be necessary in Honolulu? No one, except perhaps Black insiders, has a clue.

On the other hand, I’m told that with Gannett’s salary cuts over the past couple of years, salaries of Star-Bulletin reporters currently exceed those paid in the larger Advertiser newsroom.

In a Q&A published after the deal was announced, Black credited his lack of “overwhelming debt” as the key to his success.

As one columnist observed last week:

Newspapers do not have a profit problem. They have a debt problem. Gannett returned a Q409 margin of 20 percent.

Gannett’s debt has been lowered to “junk bond” status and analysts are beginning to see the possibility the company could default when large notes come due over the next year or two.

Meanwhile, Black and others have kept smaller, community newspapers alive and profitable, according to a story from Portfolio.com.

In terms of his newspaper philosophy, Black spoke both of the “watchdog element” of newspapers as well as being “a booster and being a cheerleader” for “progressive change” in the cities they serve. What does that signal about the shape of news to come? I worry.

Speaking of news…the Peer News web site hasn’t been updated, but editor John Temple’s blog yesterday announced the hiring of Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist, Sara Lin, as assistant editor of Peer News.

Sara was born and raised in Hawaii and graduated from Punahou School, where she was editor of the student newspaper for two years. She’s a graduate of Princeton University, where she majored in Politics and minored in East Asian Studies. While a student, she worked as an intern at Honolulu Weekly and The Honolulu Advertiser. After graduation, she went on to a reporting career at two of America’s great newspapers: the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, where today she is a real estate reporter and columnist.