On sale is Philadelphia Newspapers Incorporated (PNI). PNI is huge, and it does much more than publish the Inquirer and Daily News. PNI also publishes several chains of weekly newspapers, and runs Philly.com. Its gargantuan newspaper plant produces many local editions of real estate, auto shopping guides and advertising circulars.

PNI dominates Philly's media landscape. It's the biggest regional media company, and its products are everywhere, sucking up some 15 percent of all the money spent on advertising in the Delaware Valley, including broadcast dollars.

And all I wanted was a little piece. I've still a couple bucks left from the sale of this newspaper a decade ago. And I was thinking about something sweet and simple. Say a homey little weekly in the Northeast. Or maybe even a nice slice of the Daily News. Just imagine what fun the DN could be, once freed from its frumpy older sister.

Nothing doing, says McClatchy. The dailies, the weeklies, the Web site and the printing plant are being sold as one big lot. If you want the Northeast Times, you're gonna have to buy the ugly auto shopper.

If rumor is right, PNI will go for cheap. A bargain at $400 million. That's because Philly's media behemoth is cumbersome, and slowly starving itself. Meanwhile other media giants—like Gannett and the Journal Register Company—poach along its suburban borders, while smaller city papers like Metro, the Philadelphia Weekly, the Business Journal and this newspaper gnaw at its core.

McClatchy is making more than one mistake to unload PNI all at once. It's bad for their stockholders and it's bad for the health of Philadelphia media. Cut up, PNI's parts are worth much more than its whole. Break up the media monopoly, and many newspapers will bloom.

PNI has been holding its smaller papers back, trying to protect its leaking flagship, the Inquirer. Terrified that the Daily News would eat the Inky's lunch, or that its community papers would gnaw at the DN, PNI crippled its babies.

But it's a new age in newspapering. You don't need to own the press. Bigger is not better, and technology has made the monolith obsolete. Newspapers once needed typesetting equipment that would fling slugs of hot lead. Today, schoolkids can do it.

Once cut loose, PNI's community papers could be sold to local owners—who'll bring jobs to neighborhoods, and reinvest their profits there. Independent newspapers means more independent voices. And news gathering always thrives on competition.

Sell off the printing plant, too. There's no reason why an independent Inquirer and a liberated Daily News wouldn't continue to print their newspapers, along with other competing papers (like this one) who now run on those presses.

Sell Philly.com, which could then partner with all kinds of news sources. Philly.com already has an invaluable database. And as WiFi comes to our streets, others could leverage that database into new forms of on-the-spot access to information. That's what Google is trying in San Francisco. It could be done here, and sooner.

The newspaper business doesn't need to be a zero-sum game. But PNI has done a terrible job of nourishing the loyalty of people who love to read. Sell off the papers; give other people a chance to replant Philly's media landscape.

Rarely do corporate interests and community needs so perfectly align. It's a defining moment for Philadelphia journalism, perhaps even for the region's economy. Please, McClatchy, bust up PNI, and breed some new life. And call me when you get a price list together.

On Monday at 10 p.m., WHYY 91 FM broadcasts Justice Talking's "Whose Internet Is It?" that defines the emerging battle lines between civic needs and corporate interests in cyberspace. Philadelphia is their case-in-point, presented in a segment (which, yeah, I produced) about our city's WiFi experiment.