A last-minute reprieve of sorts meant the Tucson Citizen didn’t  publish its final edition March 21 as parent company Gannett Co. pursues negotiations with potential buyers of the afternoon daily newspaper. It’s probably only a stay of execution for the Citizen as we know it. Even if it were to continue, it most likely would be a different publication. I wonder if the late Sen. Carl Hayden and U.S. Rep. Mo Udall might be spinning in their graves? 

The business model for a printed afternoon daily newspaper has been trending down for years, but looking back on it, recent decisions by Citizen management only hastened its demise.

The Citizen bet its economic future on being a newspaper for downtown Tucson. Getting rid of more expensive distribution to outlying areas may have saved money but there weren’t enough people who live in or care about downtown Tucson to make it viable. 

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The Citizen also wasn’t a unique voice. When Democrats Hayden and Udall proposed legislation that was passed as the Newspaper Preservation Act in 1970, they worried about losing separate editorial voices. Ironically at the time, the concern was over the possibility of losing the Democratic voice of the morning Arizona Daily Star that had been snapped up five years earlier by the Republican owners of the Citizen.

But Democrats Hayden and Udall wouldn’t have been concerned if they could have foreseen what the Citizen would become.  In its dying years, the Citizen has hardly been a vigorous voice for Republican causes with editorial opinions that rarely differed from the Star’s.

What’s worse, now Gannett is using the Newspaper Preservation Act — the very law intended to keep two newspapers — to make even more profit by shutting one down.

When Gannett announced in January it would either sell or close the Citizen, it excluded for the conversation the one thing that’s profitable: its half ownership in Tucson Newspapers, the partnership created by the Newspaper Preservation Act. That partnership was worth $10.5 million profit to Gannett last year. A big drop from the $18.2 million it took out of Tucson in 2007, but still it was profit. And it was profit made because the Newspaper Preservation Act allows Tucson Newspapers to violate antitrust laws in order to publish two newspapers. The current agreement runs until 2015.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which approves these newspaper partnerships, should be requiring Gannett to include its half-ownership of Tucson Newspapers as part of the sale. Gannett might argue it can’t get full value in today’s economy, but that’s happening everywhere. 

If Gannett had been forced to sell its partnership in Tucson Newspapers, it might not have shut down the Citizen. Or other buyers might have been more eager to step up. Or the Star’s current owner Lee Enterprises, which is having its own financial issues, could have been made stronger by taking over 100 percent ownership of Tucson Newspapers at a token price.

Instead, now there’s the real possibility Gannett could someday be the publisher of Tucson’s only daily newspaper. And we all know what a job  good it did with the last newspaper it had here.

 E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4237.