Last week’s announcement that Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, is buying our hometown newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, is nothing but good news.

It helps create financial stability and local ownership which, in the opinion of this Omaha native and admirer of the news business, are a winning combination.

I know some in our community are concerned about the influence that Berkshire Hathaway, in general, and Warren Buffett, specifically, could have on the newspaper’s editorial policies and coverage decisions. But Buffett’s track record as the owner of other newspapers suggests that these concerns are unfounded.

The editorial integrity of the newspaper would be in far greater jeopardy if it had been forced to become part of a larger (read: out-of-town) news chain. Not that this was necessarily on the table, but it could have been a reasonable option to consider for financial stability. As a World-Herald news reporter stated on his personal Facebook page last week, while employee ownership was preferred, a sale of some sort was inevitable.

In the last 10 to 20 years, the trend across the country has been to consolidate news organizations into conglomerates. This isn’t all bad, but in these cases the biggest threat to the integrity of local news operations can often be the financial decisions that are made for the benefit of the entire chain -- without consideration for how these decisions impact the quality of local news. The reality is, even though you may be running a profitable local news operation, corporate budget decisions may tie the local publisher’s hands.

The World-Herald faced some tough decisions of its own, and as the newspaper outlined in its Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011, edition, it took several individuals – Terry Kroeger, Mogens Bay and Walter Scott – to make this deal happen. It’s reassuring to me that that these decisions were made by Omahans for Omaha’s newspaper.

The Buffett purchase is good news all around, for the newspaper’s employees, the World-Herald’s retired stockholders who will be able to receive cash for their investments and the entire state of Nebraska.