The last of the joint operating agreements between two daily newspapers was quietly dissolved at the end of 2025, closing a half-century era in which newspapers in 28 cities, including Honolulu, were granted exemptions from anti-trust laws to allow merging their business operations while maintaining separate newsrooms.
The last of the JOAs between the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, was voluntarily dissolved on December 28, 2025. Both newspapers have continuing publishing after the dissolution of their JOA.
In Hawaii, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser formed a joint operating agreement in May 1962 after a determination that the Advertiser was a “failing newspaper” and was unlikely to survive without the cost savings brought about by a merger with the Star-Bulletin. At that time, the Star-Bulletin, the evening newspaper, was much larger and financially healthy, while the morning Advertiser was struggling.
A separate company, the Hawaii Newspaper Agency, was formed to operate the joint printing, distribution, and business side of the merged newspapers.
But in 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court found a similar JOA in Arizona violated federal anti-trust laws, a blow to newspapers across the country.
In response, Hawaii’s senior senator, Daniel K. Inouye, introduced S 1520, the Newspaper Preservation Act, which was quickly passed into law. At the time, there were 22 JOAs involving 44 daily newspapers.
One of the joint agreements covered by Inouye’s bill was between the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser dated back to May 1962. Both newspapers were locally owned at that time. The Star-Builletin was the evening newspaper, and public reading habits at the time meant it had a considerably larger circulation than its morning rival, the Advertiser.
About a year after passage of the Newspaper Preservation Act, the Star-Bulletin was purchased by Gannett, a large national newspaper chain.
During the heyday of the Hawaii JOA, the two newspapers were reportedly sharing about $50 million per year in profit.
I was recruited to join the Star-Bulletin staff as an investigative reporter in 1992, after publishing my own newsletter about Hawaii politics for two years.
But at the same time, public habits were changing and readers moving toward morning newspapers, prompting Gannett to buy the Advertiser, which had become the larger newspaper, in 1992, soon after I received the offer to join the SB. At the same time, Gannett sold the Star-Bulletin to Liberty Newspapers, a Tennessee-based chain owned by publisher Rupert Phillips.
In early 1993, when it became clear that the Star-Bulletin would survive the transition, I belatedly accepted the offer and started as a Star-Bulletin reporter about March 1993.
The Honolulu JOA ended with the sale of the Star-Bulletin to Black Press, owned by Canadian publisher David Black. The first issue of the “new” Star-Bulletin was published on March 15, 2001.
According to Wikipedia:
The Newspaper Preservation Act was touted as a relief measure to allow multiple newspapers competing in the same market to cut costs, thus ensuring that no one paper could have supremacy in the market by driving the other(s) out of business. However, mounting evidence suggests the passage of the Act was less about protecting editorial diversity within community newspaper markets than about inflating the profit margins of national newspaper chains.[3] Large newspaper chains were able to sustain high profits while driving independent newspapers out of business, or forcing them to sell their stake to a chain.[3] In fact, President Richard M. Nixon initially opposed the passage of the act (as had his predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson) as being antithetical to the essential practices and character of free market capitalism.
He reversed himself upon receiving a letter from Richard E. Berlin, CEO of the Hearst chain of newspapers and magazines.[4] In the 1969 letter, Berlin intimated that failure of the law to pass would carry political consequences and hinted that support from Nixon would conversely help the President and his allies. The Nixon Administration supported the Act’s passage, and in the 1972 Presidential Campaign, every Hearst newspaper endorsed Nixon for reelection.
