It seems the Las Vegas Sun was taken by surprise last Friday when rival the Las Vegas Review-Journal announced it was no longer printing (and inserting) its rival… and immediately didn’t.

The Review-Journal pointed to its website and said in an editorial that the Sun was free to print its own paper, but the outcome was nonetheless, the first time the Sun had not been printed in 76 years.

Complications here include a joint operating agreement requiring the arrangement and stemming from a 1970 law designed to preserve newspapers. The two parties were soon back in court, but the incident acts as a wake-up call.

Associated Press reporter Jessica Hill quoted Ken Doctor that agreements between rival publications had dwindled as part of a “long, slow goodbye of newspapers as we knew them,” and quoted the case of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, whose 40-year agreement ended last year, and which are now both owned by USA Today Company.

The Sun’s history goes back to 1950, when Review-Journal management refused to negotiate with their union typesetters, who promptly started their own newspaper with financial support from the Greenspun family, which still owns it.

With the first 1989 JOA, the Sun was a weekday afternoon paper plus a weekend section in its rival, the arrangement then amended to cover the whole week.