Joint Operating Agreements
Printed Page 84
In this photo of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newsroom, employees stopped to watch a press conference on a dispute over its JOA with the Seattle Times. The Post-Intelligencer was started in 1863 and became an online-only paper in 2009 as the JOA ended. Hearst bought the print paper in 1921, and the online operation remains part of the Hearst Corporation today.
In 1970, a worried Congress passed the Newspaper Preservation Act, which enabled failing papers to continue operating through a joint operating agreement (JOA). Under a JOA, two competing papers keep separate news divisions while merging business and production operations for a specific number of years. Although JOAs and mergers encourage monopolistic tendencies, they have sometimes been seen as the best way to maintain some editorial competition between newspapers. After passage of the act, twenty-eight cities adopted JOAs. In 2011, however, just six JOAs remained—once again raising questions about newspapers’ likelihood of surviving. Since 1991, sixteen newspapers that were once part of a JOA have folded.