In late 1999, Honolulu was six weeks away from becoming a one-newspaper town. That more than eight years later two newspapers still serve Hawaii residents is a testament to the power of readers and journalists working together to rescue a journalistic voice that had become part of their lives.

While the threat to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin took a different form from that facing the Rocky Mountain News, its preservation offers some lessons that could apply in Denver as well. Foremost is that the newspaper was involved in a joint operating agreement – similar to what the Rocky has with the Denver Post — with the Honolulu Advertiser, a Gannett-owned newspaper that wanted to see its smaller rival go away.

Some background:

Both newspapers had long and rich histories. The Star-Bulletin was founded in 1882 as the Evening Bulletin and in 1912 merged with the Hawaiian Star to become the Star-Bulletin. The Advertiser is even older, founded in 1856 – three years before the Rocky – as the Pacific Commercial Advertiser.

Fast-forward to 1962, when the two newspapers formed a joint operating agreement in which they shared printing facilities and business personnel but maintained separate and competing editorial staffs. (Such JOAs were later codified in 1970 with the passage of the Newspaper Preservation Act, whose aim was to enable the survival of multiple daily newspapers in urban markets by exempting them from antitrust laws.)

Gannett Corp., publisher of USA Today and currently the largest newspaper company in the country by circulation, entered the picture in 1971, when it purchased the Star-Bulletin. It ran the Star-Bulletin until 1993, when it sold it to Liberty Newspapers so it could buy the larger Advertiser. Under Liberty, Star-Bulletin circulation and staffing declined, and on Sept. 16, 1999, it announced the closure of the paper.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

The community fought back. Newspaper employees, unions and members of the community formed a group called SOS – Save Our Star-Bulletin.

SOS sued Gannett for illegally trying to close the paper, alleging that the two publishers conspired to create a monopoly in Honolulu by agreeing to end the JOA in return for a $26.5 million payment to Liberty. Hawaii Gov. Ben Cayetano and Attorney General Earl Anzai filed their own lawsuit, and less than a month after the closure was announced, a Hawaii judge issued an injunction, making it the first time a federal judge had halted the planned closure of a newspaper in a JOA. A federal appeals court upheld the injunction.

Finally, in April 2000, Liberty put the Star-Bulletin up for sale under court supervision and in November, Canadian publisher David Black announced his intent to purchase the paper. When the purchase was finalized in March 2001, the JOA was dissolved.

Today, both the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin continue to operate – independently. The Advertiser still dominates, although its daily circulation has slipped below 140,000, reflecting industry trends. The Star-Bulletin, which stopped using the Audit Bureau of Circulations in 2001, said in late 2007 that its daily circulation has stayed steady at about 64,000 since the dissolution of the JOA.