When I heard the morning and afternoon papers in Madison, Wisconsin operated under a joint operating agreement even though they were owned by different companies, I was stunned. Now I’m reading that it’s common across the US, after a bill in the 70s to let papers get around non-compete laws.
So a line in a story about the Las Vegas newspaper scene didn’t really surprise me: “The Sun in September 2005 stopped publishing its afternoon edition, producing as an alternative an 8-page paper inserted into the Las Vegas Review-Journal, its JOA partner.”
I need to know more about this, though. What was happening to papers in the 70s that spurred the government to take such an extraordinary measure to protect them?