For the fourth time in my 50 years here, the newspaper at which I’ve spent my whole career is on the block.

The first sale, in 1977, was orchestrated by a board of directors under whose management the paper found itself in a difficult financial situation, but whose members stood to reap a windfall by selling.

Thus ended a 50-year period of employee ownership. Also, and much more importantly, it spelled the end of local ownership.

The new owners, Capital Cities Communications, were headquartered in New York. They paid $125 million for The Star — then the jewel among their expanding print and broadcast holdings — and nine years later they acquired the ABC network.

In 1996, Capital Cities/ABC was bought by the Walt Disney Co. for $19 billion. The print properties seemed an unlikely fit for an entertainment company, and there was wide speculation that Disney’s only real interest was in ABC as an outlet for its TV products.

Michael Eisner, then CEO and chairman, sought to spike that talk, declaring he wouldn’t dream of selling the newly acquired newspapers.

In fact, he wrote in a letter to this paper’s top executive, “I read The Star every morning.”

No one I knew believed that. But the letter was posted proudly on the newsroom bulletin board as proof of Eisner’s great esteem for us.

Almost before the ink dried, in April 1997, Disney sold the four former Capital Cities papers, including ours, to Knight-Ridder Inc. for $1.65 billion.

Though never publicly announced, it was estimated that the part of that price attributable to The Star was in the neighborhood of $800 million.

Now, eight years later, the corporate owner of the paper has announced itself available to be bought. The decision results from pressure brought to bear by several major institutional investors, impatient with their returns.

It is not that Knight Ridder isn’t making money. It is generating profits on the order of 20 percent, a result many industries would consider glittering. But it is not enough to satisfy the demands of the big fund managers.

A company’s first obligation, they insist, is to the shareholders. And there, in a phrase, lies one of the most troubling defects in the system by which we organize our economic affairs — the system we call capitalism.

I participate in that system. I hold a stake, albeit a very modest one, in what our current president likes to call the “ownership society.”

And I expect a return — a reasonable one, somewhat greater than the yield of a CD or a Treasury note. That is the legitimate hope of every investor, although it is by no means guaranteed.

I do not, however, consider that the first obligation of a company whose shares I own is to me. The responsibility, as I see it, is to the integrity of the product, the employees who create it and the customers who buy it.

In that, I agree absolutely with Jim Sinegal, CEO of the Costco Wholesale Corp., who has heard Wall Street’s complaints that by paying his employees too much and giving too generous benefits he is shorting investors.

His response is unequivocal.

“We have a four-part code of ethics,” he said by phone last week. “Obey the law. Take care of our customers. Take care of our people. Respect our suppliers.

“If we do that, our shareholders will be fine,” said Sinegal. “We want to build a business to be here 50 years from now.”

The yield of Costco’s approach is measurable in employee and customer loyalty. And if those principles are valid for a successful warehouse chain, surely they apply equally to newspapers as well, which are important political, economic and cultural resources for readers in their communities.

It is a strategy for the long run. But when shareholders’ expectations are driven not by reason but by short-term greed, that is capitalism run amok.

Without question, those who invest in a company are perfectly entitled to take their money out. They are not entitled to demand that managers gut the staff and disfigure the product simply to sweeten the take.

Newspeople, as a class, tend not to be wise about money or corporate finance. In our case, that was regrettable.

Had we known what lay ahead when that first sale of The Star was rumored nearly 30 years ago, there’s at least a reasonable chance a public-minded ownership group could have been assembled to keep control of the paper in this community — not employee-owned, but locally owned.

Capital Cities’ offer price was not, even then, an impossible sum.

But the sale was pushed through with calculated and unseemly speed. And the current value of the paper today, perhaps six times that $125 million, ensures that the chance lost in 1977 was lost forever.

When I came into this business as a poorly-paid youngster a half century ago, our main concerns were to get the facts right, finish the story by deadline time, earn enough for rent money, and have bus fare in our pockets to get home at the end of a long day.

Now we have to wonder who’ll own us next week, next year, or the year after that. And whether they’ll be the sort of people we’ll be proud or ashamed to serve.