[0] Hollinger in waiting game.

HAS media mogul Conrad Black, the world's leading champion of old-line newspapers, lost interest in the business?

The sale last week of his core assets in Canada where his Hollinger International controls more than half the daily newspaper circulation prompted speculation on both sides of the Atlantic that Black might abandon traditional publishing altogether, selling the British Telegraph titles plus Chicago Sun-Times and Jerusalem Post.

In April, when Hollinger first put its smaller North American dailies on the market, executives said Black was interested in an internet content deal "along the lines announced by Time Warner with America Online".

In Canada, his business and political rivals are gloating about what Black himself calls "a substantial departure". A columnist for Toronto's Globe & Mail, the competitor to his flagship National Post, wrote that there is "more than a whiff of defeat" about the $2.4bn sale to TV broadcaster CanWest Global. Some journalists at his newspapers which have become more conservative under Black, a history buff and connoisseur of Napoleonic military strategy are openly applauding the sale as his Waterloo.

Black compared himself to the miserly Disney cartoon character Scrooge McDuck, who liked to "get into his little bulldozer every morning and plough back and forth over his gold coins.

"Well, maybe I will just sit and look at it for a while," he told the New York Times.

But bankers who have worked with Black, 55, say it would be a mistake to believe that he is exiting print to shift into the online world, like many other publishers most notably Hollinger's Toronto rival, Thomson, which will retain only the Globe & Mail, and use its brand and resources to help sell information electronically. For one thing, they note, last week's sale includes one of the centrepieces of his anticipated internet strategy, the popular Web portal site Canada.com.

Black has also long been sceptical of the multimedia revolution, one said, and his remaining titles "don't provide the critical mass you need to be an online content player". The sale is motivated instead by a belief that the market for newspaper assets is peaking, with advertising revenue topping out and newsprint prices set to rise; Black told the New York Times that he is selling his papers "fairly close to the top of the economic cycle".

The deal, which gives Hollinger a 15% equity stake in the new CanWest, will also allow it to retire virtually all of its $1.7bn debt. Some analysts say Black is amassing a war chest, with $500m in cash, and will re-enter the newspaper market once prices for brand-name titles have come down.