We should all carefully consider the implications of the latest suggestion by the ailing US media giant Tribune. According to a Financial Times story, it is thinking of acquiring the Orange County Register in order to close it down by fusing it with the Los Angeles Times.
Evidently, Tribune - owned by Sam Zell - has held talks with the Register's owner, Freedom Communications, in order to either buy the title or to make a deal by which the Register and the Times would combine production and distribution operations to save money.
Tribune is also loosely entertaining whether it could buy Copley Press, the privately held publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune, or to construct a joint operating agreement with it.
Of course, in Britain, there has been a long history of papers buying up rivals in order to secure monopolies or reduce competition, especially in major cities. In London for example, the Evening Standard "merged" with the Evening News in 1980, and the News disappeared.
Similar mergers have happened among national papers, though not since the Daily Mail acquired the News Chronicle in 1960. (The Mail did the same to the Daily Sketch in 1971, but it was part of the same publishing stable anyway).
There has been a similar history of such activity in the States, hence those papers with double-barrelled titles, Herald-Leaders and Register-Journals and so on. But it has been very unusual in the modern era.
So a Tribune takeover of the Register would surely attract the hostile attentions of the US regulators who would be concerned about a lack of competition for advertisers. That said, the FT quotes an unnamed banker who said: "At this point, I think newspapers are in such bad shape that people would allow them to come together."
That, of course, is the pragmatic view of one reality. But it overlooks the other reality, because there is a competitive environment for advertisers. They are going to the net.
In such circumstances, how can regulators, whether in the US or Britain, possibly stop a further round of newsprint newspaper consolidation as cash-strapped companies seek to keep afloat? It is inevitable.
