Our “local” daily newspaper just got sold for the second time this year. The lucky suitor this time around was Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz, who has a variety of interests, from Industrial Christianity to oil-and-gas exploration to bicycle racing.

His Anschutz Entertainment Group owns, among other things, the Tour of California, which last year concluded in spectacularly uninteresting fashion at L.A. Live, AEG’s HQ in Los Angeles, on the same day as the NHL Western Conference finals between the Phoenix Coyotes and the L.A. Kings at the Staples Center (the latter two being AEG properties) and game four of the NBA Western Conference semis between the Clippers and San Antonio Spurs (also at the Staples Center).

AEG, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Anschutz Company — which has its corporate fingers in everything from agriculture and real estate to the gathering, blending, transportation and storage of crude oil — has been for sale since mid-September.

Forbes estimates its annual operating income to be “in excess of $300 million,” so whoever wants to spring for AEG will need to write a bigger check than Anschutz did for the Gazette (the terms of the deal were not disclosed). The Wall Street Journal expects the price to be “several billion dollars,” according to the Denver Business Journal. Forbes guesses it to be in the range of $8 billion to $10 billion. Among the players said to be interested are Oracle’s Larry Ellison and that fabled private-equity powerhouse Bain Capital, according to Forbes.

And mind you, AEG is just one of Anschutz’s cookie jars. The 72-year-old has a net worth of $7.6 billion and sits 44th on the 2012 Forbes 400. He’s No. 133 on the magazine’s billionaires list.

So why does a player like this want to add a struggling newspaper in a smallish metro area to his Clarity Media Group? To have something to read while he’s hanging around the Broadmoor, which he bought last year? Beats the shit out of me. All the stories I’ve read are overflowing with the usual marketing gibberish — expanding product and market reach, creating a new level of excellence, having a passion for the paper and its community — but the “why” of the deal remains unanswered.

Speaking with the Denver Business Journal, former Gazette vice president and editor Jeff Thomas — who was laid off a year ago — said Anschutz “is making a bet that’s largely been decided to no longer pay off.”

“There’s no question readers will like a paper that’s fatter, and better and has more coverage,” he continued. “But that’s not the question to ask. Will they pay … and will advertisers pay to advertise in a paper that’s fatter, better and has more coverage?”

Indeed. And how much of that coverage will be devoted to the issue of oil-and-gas exploration via hydraulic fracturing — a.k.a., “fracking” — in a town whose city council just voted to approve a set of rules that would allow energy companies to drill for oil and gas within the city limits — a dubious practice wholeheartedly endorsed by the Gazette‘s editorial board?

I think I’ll stick with our locally owned paper for now. The Gazette is still in the hands of out-of-town right-wingers, and the only significant difference I see at the moment is that we don’t know what this new lot is up to yet.