For many years a reporter with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Don Bauder was recently the messenger of an unconfirmed rumor about the publication’s possible next owner.

He got a no-comment from Platinum Equity, the LA based behemoth that currently signs the checks and which, after massive layoffs, claims its by-the-border daily is profitable. According to Bauder’s San Diego Reader column, the suitor is local hotelier Doug Manchester (pictured):

Manchester as a buyer would be full of ironies. He is not cooperative with the press. His interest would probably be in the real estate end of the deal…

Platinum paid only $50 million for the U-T, and may have paid as little as $35 million. The Mission Valley office alone is assessed at $92 million, and several other buildings went to Platinum in the deal.

Also in the comments to the article, several readers deride the U-T‘s current fuzzy-math claim of one million weekly readers. Bauder himself believes the paper “lost credibility when it began making that claim.”