News editor Bill Lueders, after conducting more than two dozen interviews and reading previous undisclosed letters and documents cached at the State Historical Society, begins a two-part series examining the peculiar business relationship between the owners of The Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal. Among his findings is a letter in which State Journal publisher Don Anderson called the original 1934 pact that had the two papers jointly selling advertising "a shotgun wedding conceived through the realization of both parties that we were broke." UW law professor Peter Carstensen tells Lueders that the terms of the 1934 accord were a "blatant violation of anti-trust laws," even by the lax standards of the time. The 1948 deal, which governs the two papers to this day, "would allow them to share printing and production facilities, fix prices and pool profits without violating anti-trust laws," Lueders writes. See this week's cover story for a report on how The Capital Times is faring under the agreement.
'A shotgun wedding'
From the Isthmus archives, Dec. 11, 1987