Controversy Regarding End of Circulation
The Columbus Citizen-Journal stopped printing after failed contract renegotiations for a joint operating agreement with the owners of the rival paper The Columbus Dispatch, The Dispatch Printing Co., which was controlled by the Wolfe family of Columbus. The Dispatch Printing Co. and Scripps-Howard, as the Scripps company was known in the mid-1980s, blamed each other for the demise of the Citizen-Journal."
Under the 26-year joint operating agreement that the two companies had signed in 1959, both papers were printed on The Dispatch Printing Co. printing presses. The Dispatch Printing Co. collected advertising and circulation revenue, and paid most operating expenses for both papers, while Scripps owned The Citizen-Journal's circulation lists and independently operated that paper's editorial department. More than three years prior to the Dec. 31, 1985 termination of the joint operating agreement, Dispatch executives informed Scripps that they did not wish to renew of the contract.
Scripps-Howard, a publicly-traded company, was at the time one of the largest media conglomerates in the country, and owned 14 newspapers, seven TV stations, nine cable-TV companies, seven radio stations and other media. Circulation at the Columbus Citizen-Journal had been on the rise in recent years, and Scripps reported that it was a profitable property for Scripps for most of the 26-year arrangement. Scripps, however, demonstrated a pattern of closing or selling off newspapers that were in difficult competitive positions, rather than invest in them; in the previous three years, Scripps had closed such daily newspapers in Memphis and Cleveland, and subsequently the company has done the same at several other newspapers, most recently The Rocky Mountain News of Denver, in 2009. In Columbus, after Dispatch executives cut off talks in 1982, Scripps-Howard chose to not purchase or build its own presses, or to develop its own business operations, and instead sought more talks in an attempt to renew or replace the expiring contract. The Dispatch Printing Co. declined, and even publicly announced, in its newspaper, in June 1983, its intentions to sever all ties with Scripps. A late-1985 Scripps strategy to sell the newspaper to independent businessman Nyles V. Reinfeld changed nothing, and the Columbus Citizen-Journal published for the last time on Dec. 31, 1985.
Read more about this topic: The Columbus Citizen-Journal
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