BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Broadcast is not the only medium under the protective hand of government. A messy quarrel between two Seattle papers has focused attention on the strange world of joint operating agreements or JOAs. These agreements make it possible for cities such as Cincinnati, Albuquerque, Birmingham and Detroit to be two-paper towns when they probably could support only one. Dan Gross recently looked at the issue for Slate.com. He called his story JOA DOA. We'll find out why. Dan, welcome to On the Media.

DAN GROSS: Thank you, Brooke. It's nice to be here.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So tell me first what specifically is a JOA supposed to allow papers to do?

DAN GROSS: It allows two newspapers to combine things like their printing presses, their ad sales, their distribution costs -- have those run as a single entity while maintaining separate identities and separate newsrooms. The editorial staffs are completely separate and competing. The idea is that it's supposed to save fixed costs, thus allowing newspapers to survive.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And these joint operating agreements allow for certain practices like fixed ad rates that seem almost-- monopolistic in the way they work.

DAN GROSS: It's not so much monopolistic as anti-trust behavior. This is a specific exemption from the anti-trust laws. In 1970 Congress passed the Newspaper Preservation Act which was intended to help forestall the decline or going out of business of many newspapers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And currently there are about a dozen of these joint operating agreements, and as you noted in your column, they're mostly run by huge corporations who would seem not to need that kind of protection. Before we get to the argument at hand in Seattle, how do you think it's working overall?

DAN GROSS: Overall if the intent of the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 was to preserve newspapers, it has explicitly failed. In 1970 there were 1,748 daily newspapers. Today there are 1,468, and this is with a much larger population. People just don't read newspapers like they used to. I-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And in particular they don't read afternoon newspapers at all!

DAN GROSS: Many of the original JOAs were entered between a better-off morning newspaper and a sort of struggling afternoon newspaper, so those were often the ones that were disappearing. Over the years many of them have switched to morning editions, so you ended up with two morning papers in a single city that didn't necessarily have the advertising or readership to support them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And largely because the readership is going somewhere else.

DAN GROSS: Yes. I don't think people are accessing information less or tuning things out. They're just getting it in different ways.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay, so now fill us in on what the heck is going on in Seattle.

DAN GROSS: In Seattle you have the Seattle Times which is owned by a family, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer which is owned by Hearst Corp. and they've been in a JOA for many years. The Times wants out, and it's been saying we've been having these losses, we want the JOA to dissolve. The Times also owns the printing plants.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so the Times wants a divorce, and I suppose Post-Intelligencer doesn't. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

DAN GROSS: They want a divorce. They want a divorce and they want to take the house. [LAUGHTER] The Post-Intelligencer doesn't want out, because it doesn't own the printing presses. If it were on its own again, it would either have to fix whatever old ones were there or buy new ones, and that would put it at a big competitive disadvantage.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so then if this marriage is dissolved, does that necessarily mean that the Post-Intelligencer goes down?

DAN GROSS: Not necessarily. Hearst has massive resources. It could pave the way for an old-fashioned newspaper war.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you suggest that we should do away with JOAs all together?

DAN GROSS: I question whether the daily newspaper business deserves some sort of exemption from anti-trust rules that bind every other type of business and that bind other types of media companies. There's obviously something special about daily newspapers, and, and in many ways it's nostalgic. I think that in today's environment, when the barriers to starting a publication are comparatively small -- you can start one on the internet for practically nothing -- the notion that these very large corporations should get some kind of dispensation from the anti-trust rules that everyone else has to play by-- increasingly doesn't seem to make sense.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you think that these JOAs are, are pretty much a sepia-tinged innovation and their time has passed.

DAN GROSS: Well there's something profoundly backward-looking about it. Even the name of the law --the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970; it's as if in act of Congress could stand in the way of technological innovation and the sort of industrial changes that have been coursing through our entire economy in the 20th Century. Any law, it strikes me, whether it's the Textile Industry Preservation Act -- if there had been one in 1975 -- that would not have succeeded in keeping textile jobs here. There are forces that are mitigating against daily newspapers that are far stronger than an act of Congress.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.

DAN GROSS: Thanks for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dan Gross writes the Moneybox column for Slate.com. Solvency is not the only problem plaguing newspapers. Accuracy is another. One out of every two stories in your daily newspaper -- or for that matter in this show -- will likely contain some type of mistake. It may be small -- a grammatical error or a misspelled name -- or something more serious such as an incorrect or out of context quotation.