Both The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press have struggled with the same ills that have plagued the industry: Print advertising and circulation revenue declines and losses that gains in digital readership and advertising have been unable to offset.

Ad revenue at U.S. newspapers last year fell to $16.5 billion and has been steadily declining since a peak of $49.4 billion in 2005, according to data from the Pew Research Center's annual Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst with nonprofit Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., told Crain's for a 2015 story that newspaper deals generally have been a failure.

"Really, in most any place, it actually damages both newspapers," he said. "There has been strong financial pressure to dissolve them."

More than 20 JOAs have been terminated, often with one paper going out of business or becoming an online-only news outlet. Such an example is Seattle, where the Post-Intelligencer became a purely digital newspaper in 2009, two years after a legal settlement ended a 26-year JOA with the Seattle Times, which remains a print daily. Other major markets that saw JOAs end include Denver, Miami, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St. Louis and Columbus.

There are believed to be five JOAs still active.

The intent of the operating agreements was to maintain two different editorial voices in a city, Edmonds said, but the business model hasn't worked because savings realized from consolidations doesn't offset competition.

"In practice, even with these advantages, they continue to compete with each other for advertising and readers," he said. "One just keeps withering away. It made most of them untenable over time."

In a conversation last week, Edmonds said his negative outlook on JOAs hasn't changed, even if Detroit's partnership is profitable.

"The record continues to show they have not really brought sustainability," he said. "There's barely enough business to support one paper in a given town much less two."

If Detroit's dailies and Michigan.com, which handles advertising sales, marketing, printing and delivery functions of the partnership, have turned a profit, they did it through a blend of new tools and strategies outside of their core newsprint products and through old-school, corporate bloodletting.

In recent years, they sought to increase revenue by investing in digital efforts to get their journalism in front of more eyeballs and have added money-making endeavors, such as events and custom content.

They also reduced head count by the hundreds through rounds of buyouts, early-retirement incentives, layoffs and eliminating or not filling jobs. There have been mandatory unpaid furloughs and pay freezes. Newsroom labor contracts — the current three-year deals expire in February 2019 — have done little to stem the reductions. Functions such as copy editing and design at the Freep were shifted out of state.

Moreover, the end of the JOA could hasten further declines or save one newspaper at the expense of the other.

The smaller Detroit News is the likelier of the two to succumb. Free Press corporate parent Gannett Co. Inc. owns 95 percent of the JOA partnership and pays millions of dollars annually to subsidize The News, per the contract terms.