Not long ago, Kevin Murphy was simply the president of the Berks County Community Foundation in Reading, Pennsylvania, a city of about 80,000 an hour northwest of Philadelphia. Like most community foundations, Murphy’s manages a range of charitable funds for everything from scholarships to farmland preservation. And like most people in the philanthropy business, Murphy likes his projects to be well planned, predictable even.

Then, on December 30, 2008, Myrtle Quier, whose family owns the city’s 60,000-circulation daily newspaper, The Reading Eagle, died at age 101, and left the foundation a 27 percent stake in the Reading Eagle Company (it also owns a radio station), making the foundation not only the only nonfamily shareholder but the largest shareholder.

Just like that, Murphy was thrust into the frantic world of media ownership, circa 2009, where things are, to put it mildly, often not well planned and extremely unpredictable. “Everyone is throwing things against the wall to see what sticks,” Murphy says. “So that’s what we’re going to do.”

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