Lee Enterprises (LEE) which carries almost $1 billion in debt was for sale as late as yesterday for only $34 million. Lee is the parent company of The World, Bandon Western World and the Umpqua Post.

Last Thursday evening, Lee announced a monumental debt refinancing (pdf) that will prevent the company from going Chapter 11 and having the shareholders get wiped out. The market reaction on Friday was to move the stock from $0.60 a share all the way up to… $0.62. Then the following Monday it actually went down to $.615. So if any researcher believes markets are always efficient, that’s an anomaly they’ll definitely want to check out. Even though Lee had been priced as if its death were imminent, the big announcement that stockholders escaped the executioner’s ax barely budged the stock price at all.

For now the company has some breathing room but there may be a paywall at the online site looming in our future.

Obviously the overall franchises are not as good as they used to be. There’s been a lot of information available online for free now including, unfortunately, the newspapers themselves that for some reason have thought they needed to offer everything for free online. However, as of this past summer, Lee has begun rolling out paywalls for its papers, so it’s definitely solving this problem over time.