What is the joint operating agreement that the Pittsburgh Post Gazette has?”
Then, on November 12, 1961, to meet the increasing costs of newspaper publishing, the Post-Gazette entered into a Joint Operating Agreement with the Pittsburgh Press Company. The agreement allowed the Post-Gazette to maintain ownership and control of its news and editorial departments, while having its production, circulation and advertising sales handled by the Press Company.
PITTSBURGH, Jan. 18— Saying they were starved for local news, sports columns, comic strips, job advertisements, movie listings and obituary notices, Pittsburgh residents lined up in the bitter cold outside news vendors this morning to buy the first copies of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to roll off the presses in eight months. “This is exciting,” Laverne Dober, 40, a clerk in a downtown finance company, said as she waited to buy a copy of the city’s only major newspaper to survive a long strike by employees. “We haven’t had a hometown paper for so long, it’s ridiculous.” The Post-Gazette, emerging from one of the longest American newspaper strikes in decades, anticipated this appetite by providing an unusually fat 80-page newspaper, complete with a half-dozen articles on the strike and a two-page summary of other major events in Pittsburgh and the world in 1992. “I’ve got to read this to tell me what happened during the strike,” said Kim Metheny, 40, who works with the Girl Scouts here.
In 1960, Pittsburgh had three daily papers: the Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. The Post-Gazette bought the Sun-Telegraph, and moved into the Sun-Telegraph’s Grant Street offices. The Post-Gazette tried to publish a Sunday paper to compete with the Sunday Press but it was not profitable; rising costs in general were challenging the company’s bottom line. In November 1961, the Post-Gazette entered into an agreement with the Pittsburgh Press Company to combine their production and advertising sales operations. The Post-Gazette owned and operated its own news and editorial departments, but production and distribution of the paper was handled by the larger Press office. This agreement stayed in place for over 30 years.
