A buyer for the East Valley Tribune, slated to close at the end of the year, has been found, publisher Julie Moreno told employees today.

The paper’s owner, Freedom Communications, is in bankruptcy and said two weeks ago that it would shut the paper down at the end of the year after a suitable buyer could not be found.

EVT story here.

The only discomfiting thing about the news is that … we don’t know who the new owner might be:

The buyer was not identified.

Moreno said the buyer has indicated they plan to keep a “substantial” number of Tribune employees.

In a conference call with Tribune employees Friday from Freedom headquarters in Irvine, Calif., Moreno said she has not had any conversations with the buyer about how the business will operate in the future, “but it’s my understanding the intention is to continue to operate the newspaper and Web site.”

More on the sale at Heat City.

If the buyer ever officially materializes and the deal actually goes through, this is great news for the paper’s employees, who were facing a grim new year.

Whether the paper can financially support itself after the deal is the hard part. Freedom’s in the trouble it’s in because it over-leveraged itself buying up new properties, and found itself with its financial pants down after the economic downturn.

Let me underline this point, because it’s not often mentioned in stories about the state of the newspaper industry: Up until very recently, most newspapers made a lot of money. Even in an economic collapse the papers should have been able to get by. (I guess we have to take the word of Freedom that the EVT has been unprofitable for the last two years, but I’d also like to see the sort of money it was throwing off up until 2007.)

But variations of expansion and acquisitions have burdened them with excessive debt, and that’s what’s killing a lot of them.

Now, Freedom is a special case. Some of the family ownership was smart and unloaded about half their interest about five years ago, in a deal that saw a couple of private-equity groups take a 40 percent share.

A WSJ story on the issue said this deal entailed a “relatively small” amount of debt. But here’s an example of how the numbers are working: That same story said the company’s revenues were down fully 75 percent—but it still was earning $50 million. (Note that it was making some $200 million a year until recently.)

Now, that’s not an enormous figure for such a large company (which owns dozens of small papers and eight TV stations).

But when their corporate ownership is leveraged up to its keister, two things happen. One, the papers’ profits are devoted to paying off the companies’ debt. (Which is to say, the profits are going to pay the bill for the privilege of being owned by the financial manipulators who put the deal together.)

That mean the profits aren’t going into making the property better; when the owners themselves aren’t getting their money first, they have even less impetus to sink money into the papers—and that gives subscribers less reason to stay with them.

And two, the leverage gives the papers no breathing room. The advantage of being held by a private company is that in theory you can weather troubled times and think long term without pressure from stockholders to maximize short-term profits. That’s not happening any more.

Here, it seems Freedom’s owners will be wiped out; they’ve supposedly already written off close to $500 million.

The big question about the new owner is: How much debt will it be carrying?

The answer to that question will tell us whether we’ll be reading the same stories a year from now.