Congressional Quarterly is profitable. The company that owns it also owns the St. Petersburg Times, which is less (or un-)profitable. So the company is selling CQ to shore up the declining paper. Is that bad?

Depends on what you care about! This is the hot new trend among drowning newspaper companies: sell off the profitable pieces of your business in order to support the newspaper, which is what's dragging you down. The New York Times Co. is selling off its stake in the Boston Red Sox to help bolster the rest of the business, for example.

This is like selling off the family jewels to buy food. It makes perfect sense if you're starving, but when the jewels run out, you're fucked. And any good investment manager will tell you that selling off your winners and holding your losers is a losing strategy.

On the other hand, you don't expect a newspaper company to sell its newspaper, do you? Imagine the psychic blow! Also, who do you think they could sell it to? Also, if you're of the opinion that newspapers are vital public institutions whose value exceeds that which can be measured in dollars, then it might make sense for a diversified company to sell off everything to save the paper.

But only if the cash they're raising is going towards some long-term stabilization plan. Like going nonprofit, for instance. It's the hot new newspaper philosophy! (The St. Petersburg Times, owned by the Poynter Institute, has already tried that.) But just mindlessly selling profitable businesses in order to raise cash that will be poured into the money-losing pit of another business and eventually swallowed up completely with nothing left to show for it is not smart.