In This Issue

JUST DAYS AFTER Richard Nixon signed the so-called Newspaper Preservation Act into law, in 1970, legalizing the joint operating agreements that meant the end of daily newspaper competition in most U.S. cities, the Bay Guardian filed suit in federal court, seeking to overturn the San Francisco Chronicle-San Francisco Examiner JOA and invalidate the law.

It was the first major salvo in what has been a theme issue and ongoing campaign for the Bay Guardian: the battle against the concentration of media control.

When Bruce B. Brugmann and Jean Dibble first decided to start a newspaper in San Francisco, there were three dailies in town: the Ex, the Chron, and the News-Call-Bulletin. In 1965, the year before the first issue of the Bay Guardian rolled off the presses, Hearst Corp. shut down the News-Call-Bulletin and formed a JOA with the family-owned Chron – eliminating, in one quick move, the onetime lively battles between San Francisco's major papers.

The local JOA was illegal until Nixon gave the newspaper business a unique and unprecedented exemption from the federal antitrust laws. It allowed papers like the Chron and the Ex to fix prices, pool profits, and share markets. And although the Bay Guardian lawsuit didn't succeed in overturning the law, the fight helped establish this paper as one of the leading voices for media diversity and independence in the nation (and a model for competing alternatives fighting monopoly dailies all over the country).

More than three decades later, as Camille T. Taiara reports on page 13, the Federal Communications Commission has paved the way for vastly increased media mergers. The days when two-paper JOAs were the big problem are over. Under the new FCC doctrine, Hearst, which now owns the Chron, could potentially own not just the city's one daily but also all three local TV stations, up to eight radio stations, and the cable TV franchise.

Meanwhile, consolidation has come to the alternative newspaper industry: the competing weekly in San Francisco, the SF Weekly, is owned by the Phoenix-based New Times chain, which also owns the East Bay Express and weekly papers in nine other cities. Real independent journalism is more and more rare.

But we've kept up the fight, and it's helped us grow over the years, and with this issue, we're changing the descriptive line on our cover. The Bay Guardian is, and will remain, "The nation's #1 independent alternative." You read it here first.