If Tribune reporters think they have ownership problems...

These are grim times in the news business. A new study from the Audit Bureau of Circulation shows that just about every major metro paper in the country is getting killed, and the papers are shedding staff almost as fast as they're losing readers. An odd counter-blip in those trend lines, though, comes from an unusual source: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In 2004, the nation's biggest business lobby started legal newspapers in Madison County, Illinois, and West Virginia as propaganda vehicles to support the chamber's $40 million campaign for limits on class action lawsuits. The chamber's ownership was largely secret until the Washington Post helped blow the whistle. You'd think the outing might have spelled doom for the papers. Instead, as chamber president Tom Donohue said Thursday at the group's 7th annual Legal Reform Summit, "The damn things are making money!" The papers are doing so well, according to Donohue, the chamber is planning to launch another one in Texas.

I tried to ask the chamber just how well the papers were doing, but their press guy has so far not returned my call, nor has the ad rep at the flagship Madison paper. So I'm forced to rely on the web for additional details. With a staff of about five, according to the website, the Madison Record prints 10,000 copies a week and claims 25,000 unique visitors a month to its website. The paper's court reporter, though, shouldn't get too comfortable in his Edwardsville office.

With help from the papers, the chamber won federal limits on class actions in 2005. So while Madison County may have once been a hotbed of litigation, the number of class actions filed there has plummeted from a high of 103 in 2003, to just one so far this year, according to the Manhattan Institute.  If the chamber's tort reform success continues, its newspapers will eventually go the way of the L.A. Times (whose circulation fell a depressing 8 percent in the last six months), if only because they won't have any news left to cover.