The owners of the Star Tribune are about to buy the owners of the Pioneer Press. Sunday night Knight Ridder, which published the Pioneer Press agreed to a buyout offer from McClatchy, Co., which publishes the Star Tribune. Reports put the deal at $4.5 billion.

McClatchy is actually much smaller than Knight Ridder, which makes the deal look a little bit like the worm swallowing the fish. But the latest from the Associated Press makes it clear that McClatchy intends to spin off a number of the papers it will buy in the deal:

McClatchy plans to sell 12 of Knight Ridder's 32 newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and the San Jose Mercury News, saying that those papers don't fit the company's longstanding criteria of buying newspapers in growing markets. McClatchy also plans to sell Knight Ridder's newspaper in St. Paul, Minn., the St. Paul Pioneer Press, in anticipation of antitrust concerns that would arise out of McClatchy's ownership of the Star Tribune in the adjacent city of Minneapolis.

Which means more uncertainty for employees at the Pioneer Press and for news consumers here in Minnesota. I guess the positive news for both the former and the latter is that McClatchy is not talking about closing the Pioneer outright.

There's not a lot of political news today, unless you count the absence politicians as news. More than 15,000 people showed up for a public memorial for Kirby Puckett at the Metrodome Sunday night and, refreshingly, there was not a single politician in sight. Annie Baxter had the story from MPR:

Inside the Metrodome, Bo Clark said he had an extra motivation for feeling proud of Kirby Puckett: the two of them were neighbors back in Chicago's Robert Taylor housing project.

"Our families grew up together, right across the street from one another. He's always going to have Minnesota, but Chicago is always going to live in his heart, just like mine. But it's good to see all this support out here for him in the Twin Cities and to know he was always loved here," Taylor said.