The joint operating agreement that helped sustain two daily newspapers in Detroit will be dissolved at the beginning of 2026, turning the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News loose in a world and industry far different than the ones that existed when last they were independent businesses.

The Free Press’ owner, Gannett, made the announcement on Monday, June 16.

“The joint operating agreement between the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News is set to expire at the end of this year, and the partnership will not be renewed,” said Chief Communications Officer Lark-Marie Anton, in a statement. "The Detroit Free Press will continue to deliver essential news and content for our valued audiences and provide the best marketing solutions for our clients."

Nicole Avery Nichols, editor and vice president of the Detroit Free Press, speaks to the staff about the end of the Joint Operating Agreement between the Free Press and the Detroit News and what that means to the paper and Detroit going forward in the conference of their office at WeWork in downtown Detroit, Monday, June 16, 2025.

The Free Press and News combined their business operations Nov. 27, 1989, after a 3 ½-year legal bobsled ride ended with a tie vote in the U.S. Supreme Court. The 4-4 split likely kept the Free Press, founded in 1831, from closing its doors.

While the two newsrooms have remained separate and rabidly competitive, the joint operating agreement (JOA) allowed the papers to save money by combining such functions as selling advertising, maintaining printing presses, and distributing newspapers to doorsteps and drugstores in an increasingly digital age.

The Free Press will continue to offer a print edition seven days a week, while also maintaining one of Michigan’s most visited media websites, freep.com.

"The tale of the two daily newspapers in Detroit is one of those truly great American stories,” said Nicole Avery Nichols, editor and vice president of the Free Press. “It's one that centers on how a tremendous challenge was overcome by an epic battle — in this case, it was a fight to sustain robust local journalism on behalf of metro Detroiters.

“Detroit should be exceedingly proud of that journalistic legacy.”

Avery Nichols noted that even as the JOA spanned three recessions and a pandemic, the Free Press expanded its outreach and impact with a variety of events and innovations, among them The Freep Film Festival, the Top 10 Takeover dining series, the annual High School Sports Awards, curated newsletters and award-winning video and audio projects.

The original truce ending a long newspaper war between the Free Press and News called for an alliance of 100 years.

It lasted instead for 36 years and an eon, a period that saw the explosion of the internet and social media and the implosion of such traditional newspaper profit centers as help-wanted listings and weekly full-page ads from dueling department stores.

Today, the world has changed. The Free Press has won Emmy awards traditionally won by TV stations, news websites have joined newspapers in winning Pulitzers, and readers in Portugal and Port Huron expect to learn in real time about a jury verdict in Pontiac.

“The technology would have happened anyway, with or without the JOA,” said University of Michigan Dearborn communications professor Tim Kiska, a former reporter at both the Free Press and News.

As for whether the JOA was a success, “it worked in that we still have two newspapers,” he said. “But it didn’t delay anything else.”

Freep overcomes hard start

The Free Press entered the JOA having declared itself a failing newspaper, with the CEO of owner Knight Ridder stating under oath that the Free Press would fold without the plan’s approval by the U.S. Justice Department.

Federal law all but required one of the papers to be in danger of going under, and while the News was also hemorrhaging money, its afternoon and morning home delivery made it the larger and less hobbled publication.

“The Free Press could die,” publisher David Lawrence Jr. told readers in a front-page editorial in January 1988.

It didn’t, and though predictions of huge JOA profits have not come true, the Free Press has become the better-read partner, with a monthly digital audience of millions.

Gannett now owns more than 150 newspapers nationwide and more than a dozen in Michigan, from Sturgis to Sault Ste. Marie. The chain, which purchased the News in 1986, switched sides in 2005, buying the Free Press and all but giving the News to Denver-based MediaNews Group. The Freep’s previous owner, Knight Ridder – at one point the nation’s largest newspaper publisher – no longer exists; it was sold under duress in 2006 to the McClatchy Co., which was in turn purchased out of bankruptcy in 2020 by a hedge fund.

(Even after the end of Knight Ridder, the Knight Foundation has invested in the cities in which the company had papers and continues to invest in journalism.)

“If you go back and look at newspapers from the 1960s or ‘70s, even the ‘80s, it’s obvious how things have changed,” Kiska said. “The only thing they had to worry about (then) was local TV and radio. There was enough to go around.”

Time and technology prompt change

The JOA contract was rewritten several times as the media landscape changed, and it will be allowed to expire after Dec. 31, 2025.

That date marks the end of a 20-year deal dating from MediaNews Group’s entry into Detroit.

For $25 million in stock, according to a Crain’s Detroit Business report in 2005, MNG received the News, a 5% interest in the Detroit Media Partnership that oversees the business operations of the JOA, and annual payments beginning with $5 million in 2006. In addition, the partnership agreed to cover the News’ newsroom salaries.

A revision in 2009, Crain’s reported, dropped the overall value of the payments from $50.7 million to $45.2 million.

Sixteen years later, Gannett shared no specific reasons for the end of the agreement, but said, “During this transition period, we will be working diligently to adapt our operations.”

Of 28 JOAs approved since the passage of the Newspaper Preservation Act by Congress in 1970, only the one in Las Vegas will remain as of the new year. There, the Las Vegas Sun appears as an insert in the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The preservation act was designed to grant limited antitrust exemptions to struggling papers in competitive markets, the better to maintain multiple sources of information and opinion.

Locked in an unyielding battle for scoops, readers and advertising dollars, the Free Press and the News pummeled one another before the JOA with discounts and below-market prices. At a time when papers in other cities were already charging 50 cents for single copies, the News cost 15 cents and the Free Press was only a nickel more.

Advertising rates were often similarly low, even as the papers’ court filings claimed combined losses of $142 million from 1981 through early 1987.

In theory, it was an investment in market dominance, with annual profits of tens of millions of dollars awaiting the victor. In practice, the two Detroit newspapers were two travelers fighting in a canoe, unwilling to unclasp their fingers from one another’s necks to pick up an oar.

The early months of JOA implementation were more chaos than cure. Hundreds of employees in roles deemed redundant lost their jobs. Then the newspaper strike in 1995 chased away hundreds of thousands of subscribers and prompted many advertisers to explore other options.

The internet brought an onslaught of change and innovation, supplanting the traditional media model and making way for new approaches and broader audiences.

“Looking to the future,” said Avery Nichols, “the Detroit Free Press will continue to deliver essential journalism that is not only factual and relevant, but also entertaining and innovative.

“It's a new beginning, however our commitment to serving the information needs of our audiences is as intense as it always has been."

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Free Press, Detroit News to end joint operating agreement at end of 2025