An old FCC rule is being used to justify shrinking the Dayton “Daily” News to three days a week

To increase the quality of local journalism in Ohio, the Federal Communications Commission is requiring three newspapers to stop printing daily.  Back in 1975, a thousand media ecosystems ago, the FCC passed a well-intentioned rule that said a city’s newspaper couldn’t be owned by the same company that owns one of its TV or radio stations. There were only a few available slots in each market for a TV station, and those were divvied up by the FCC; there was, even then, usually only one, maybe two newspapers in most cities. In that limited environment for local media, it made sense to say different people needed to own a paper and a station. But the FCC rule grandfathered in the many newspapers that already owned a TV station. And over time, enforcement of the rule weakened.

If you’re grandfathered in, though, that exemption goes away if you sell your outlet to someone else. And that’s what happened with Cox — a once-proud news company. Cox owned the Dayton Daily News — it was the newspaper that started the company, actually — and WHIO-TV in Dayton. (Also, four radio stations. And two nearby county-seat papers, the Springfield News-Sun and the Hamilton Journal-News.) So when it agreed to sell a controlling share to Apollo Global Management in February for $3.1 billion, there was the possibility of a problem. That possibility grew stronger when a surprise court ruling pushed the FCC to enforce the rule more strictly.