Joint operating agreements keep rival newspapers alive

Throughout the battle between Salt Lake City's two daily newspapers, one phrase has continually reared its confusing head: joint operating agreement.

Basically, a joint operating agreement (JOA) combines the business aspects of the two papers while leaving the editorial voices independent. The stated goal of such agreements, and the reason Congress allowed them despite the monopolies they can create, is to ensure the public has at least two differing voices from which to choose.

"[The JOA] has kept both voices alive," said John Flynn, a Utah law professor who has studied JOAs for nearly two decades. "The risk is that those two competing voices will be dulled because they both have common (business) interests."

Such agreements between two competing papers date back to the Depression years, when the Albuquerque Journal and Albuquerque Tribune joined their printing and advertising operations. In 1970, the Nixon administration sponsored the Newspaper Preservation Act, which formally recognized these agreements as legal exemptions to federal anti-trust laws. At the time of the bill's passage, a number of JOA's already existed, including the 1952 agreement between the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune.

While a JOA has kept existing editorial voices in business, it also creates a monopoly atmosphere so the two newspapers can fix prices and need not compete for advertising dollars. And that can decrease the chances of a third newspaper succeeding in such a market, Flynn said.

"If I'm a new newspaper, I think that it could be practically impossible to compete against both papers," he said.

Throughout the decades, most of the JOAs have had a few things in common. Nearly all of them involve an afternoon and a morning paper, with the morning paper usually the dominant partner. The JOAs often came about because one of the papers found itself in financial straits. Finally, many of the JOAs have had just as many power struggles and legal wranglings as are currently occurring in Salt Lake City.

Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, JOAs thrived with some 28 in operation. Within the past two decades, however, JOAs have started to fall out of vogue, and almost half of the remaining 13 JOAs are threatened for various reasons. In the past two years, JOAs have ended in San Francisco, Chattanooga, Tenn., and Evansville, Ind. In both the Chattanooga and Evansville cases, one of the newspapers folded.