The people who are least surprised by this response are our editors. No one knows better than they do that the people in their communities enjoy a real sense of ownership in these newspapers.

It wasn't always this way. Some of our papers have been strong from the beginning, but others have blossomed only since we separated four years ago from Metro, the company our publisher, David Cohen, co-founded in 1985.

Since the sale to Knight Ridder, I have thought a lot about who we were and what we've become. We are so busy meeting deadlines, training young reporters and being involved in our local communities that we sometimes lose sight of just how unique we are.

We are a company that has found success in a very sophisticated, high-tech area doing something very old-fashioned. We publish true hometown newspapers. And we do it in a region of suburban sprawl, an area where it's often hard to tell when you cross the border of one city and move to the next. It's not surprising that Knight Ridder, a media corporation that has aggressively sought successful models to stay competitive in the rapidly changing news environment, would notice us. We are, after all, in Knight Ridder's own backyard. Many Knight Ridder employees read our publications at home and consider them their hometown newspapers.

Sure, in the Knight Ridder board room, they'll look at us as part of their "targeted publications division." But here at the Community Newspapers, we're still calling ourselves "fiercely local" community newspapers.

David Cohen sold Silicon Valley Community Newspapers to ease the burden of the debt he incurred when he bought the company and to provide the company with more resources so that we could continue to grow and to provide more opportunities for our staff, including a career path for our hard-working young reporters. The company has been profitable from the beginning, and we are proud of that. But because of the debt burden, we have not been able to grow and expand as much as we would like using the model that we have developed.

Just how did this model evolve?

About the time we became an independent company, we began exploring a concept called civic journalism, because we believed that some aspects of the approach made sense for us. Our editors particularly liked the concept of providing news in a way that engages readers to solve community problems. We still use tools provided by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, and civic journalism is still part of our training for our editorial staff. We began to realize, though, that what started as a specific approach had evolved into something we now think of as "Community Journalism the way we practice it."

Our committed editors are key to our editorial success. Each editor is responsible for two community papers, and they know these communities inside and out. They read council agendas the way some people devour mystery novels. Some of them anticipate curling up on the sofa in front of a council meeting on their community access channel the way some people look forward to an evening with The Sopranos.

An editor who doesn't focus on his or her community, who is not committed to fiercely local coverage, doesn't last long with the Community Newspapers.

We once had an editor who figured out that it would be much easier to produce one cover story each week and run the same story in both of his papers. Well, it was efficient, but it wasn't local by our definition. He didn't last long with us.

In a creative writing class, I came across the term "tone deaf" in reference to a writer who missed the subtle nuances of language. An editor can be tone deaf to his or her community. And when that happens, we're in trouble. Editors don't last long here if they are tone deaf to their communities, and believe me, every one of the communities where we publish newspapers has a strong, distinctive personality. We pride ourselves on editors who have developed the art of becoming a part of the community while managing to maintain the arm's-length distance required for objectivity.

Some of our readers have asked if our relationship with Knight Ridder will affect how we endorse candidates. Last week, we had an editorial board meeting with Sunnyvale City Council candidates. We learned that they had just come from an endorsement meeting with the Palo Alto Daily News, now a sister publication in the Knight Ridder family. We don't intend to ask their editor who they are endorsing any more than we intend to ask the editors at the Mercury News who they are endorsing. That's because here at the Community Newspapers, we are doing business as usual.

To those who have expressed concern about our relationship with Knight Ridder, I can only say that we have every intention of continuing to produce newspapers that are fiercely local with an independent perspective. We have a strong editorial staff, and our editors are passionate and committed to community journalism the way we practice it. There's not a tone deaf one among them.