AS THE JOA TURNS: SEATTLE, SALT LAKE SOAP OPERAS

Publishing pacts come in two flavors and too many partners

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – If nothing else, life under a joint operating agreement (JOA) is interesting. Some might say it has all the qualities of a good television soap opera.

Of course, I speak with some degree of authority, having worked at a paper in an agency-style operation for 12 years. Whatever impressions I might have were probably colored by the fact that for 10 of those years, I had direct contact with top agency management on a daily basis.

All I need to say, I think, is that I was quite startled when I paid my first visit to a paper not run under a joint operating agreement. I found that in non-JOAs, cooperation between departments was certainly minuscule, but there appeared to be at least some communication, and much less internecine warfare.

But you don't need to have spent a decade in – well, hell is too strong a simile, but you get the idea – to know how crazy joint operating agreements are. All you have to do is read this issue of NewsInc. Inside, we chronicle the end to the strike in Seattle, where the workers at the Post-Intelligencer returned earlier this month, a little more than a week before their colleagues at the Times. The union basically accepted the same package that was offered before the strike started in November.

We then follow up with a look at the turmoil at Salt Lake City's two newspapers, and give you the highlights of how MediaNews Group of Denver came to acquire the Salt Lake Tribune.

All of this turmoil is set against a backdrop of other JOA change – the San Francisco JOA where I worked died in November, and the JOA in Honolulu is scheduled to end in March. In both those instances, the weaker of the two papers has been given a shot at existing on its own, rather than simply dying.

And then there's the launch of a JOA in Denver. In one of its last gasps, the Clinton administration approved the establishment of an agency-type agreement for the Denver Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. Creation of the Denver Newspaper Agency moves apace. (Here at the Newspaper Association of America's production workshops, a manager who had worked at one of those papers turned to me and said, "I cannot imagine attempting to merge those two cultures." He then made a face similar to the one a small child makes when it tastes something it doesn't like.)

JOAs come in two flavors – host-tenant and agency. Under a host-tenant JOA, one newspaper provides all non-editorial functions for the second paper, which provides staffing only for covering the news. With an agency, both papers are provided with non-editorial services by a jointly owned company. Among agencies, there are two further categories – those where the principals each own one-half of the agency, and those where one principal owns more.

Counting Denver, there are now 12 JOAs in the United States: eight agency-type agreements and four host-tenant. With the Denver changeover and the acquisition in Salt Lake, MediaNews Group of Denver now ties E.W. Scripps Co. of Cincinnati as participants in the most JOAs (they each have four). Coming in third is Knight Ridder of San Jose, which participates directly in two JOAs (Detroit and Fort Wayne, Ind.), and indirectly in a third (it has a 49.5 percent minority interest in the Seattle Times).

Though my personal experience still leaves me skeptical about JOAs, I suspect that a host-tenant or where one of the principals was dominant would be preferable to my experience, which was a 50-50 deal. We always said that if one of the two partners had the ability to make a decision on its own, that both papers would benefit overall.

When you consider that there are 1400 daily papers in the United States and that only 24 of them are in JOAs, it doesn't amount to, as Humphrey Bogart said in the classiest soap opera ever, Casblanca, a hill of beans.

But JOAs are sure fun to watch. Tune in tomorrow.

Inside ...

• Strike ends in Seattle and Times says it needs 160 fewer workers
• Big changes at Salt Lake agency; Tribune managers sue
• Smaller papers find that advertisers want market research data
• Papers save by making workers take driver training classes
• Successful new Sunday supplements tap underserved readers
• Should on-line and print be separate?
• Persons

From NEWSINC., Jan. 15, 2001, Copyright © 2001, The Cole Group. All Rights Reserved.