Greenville Publishing Company, Inc. v. The Daily Reflector, Incorporated

496 F.2d 391
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
DecidedMay 1, 1974
Docket73-2323
StatusPublished
Cited by173 cases

This text of 496 F.2d 391 (Greenville Publishing Company, Inc. v. The Daily Reflector, Incorporated) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Greenville Publishing Company, Inc. v. The Daily Reflector, Incorporated, 496 F.2d 391 (4th Cir. 1974).

Opinion

CRAVEN, Circuit Judge:

The parties in this antitrust suit are competitors in the business of local advertising in Greenville, North Carolina. Both plaintiff and defendants publish shoppers guides, free weekly tabloids composed almost entirely of advertising. Defendants also publish the only daily newspaper in Greenville. Plaintiff charged defendants with setting their shopper’s advertising rates below cost in order to regain the monopoly they enjoyed before plaintiff entered the market. The district court entered summary judgment for defendants. On appeal the major issues are the sufficiency of the parties’ connection with interstate commerce and the legality of defendants’ pricing policies under the Sherman Act. We reverse and remand for trial.

Plaintiff, the Greenville Publishing Company, was organized in 1970 to publish a shoppers guide in Greenville. The organizers were apparently unaware that the publishers of the Greenville Daily Reflector had just finished modernizing and expanding their facilities with an eye toward publication of their own shoppers guide. Upon learning of the newcomer’s plans, the Reflector’s management decided to accelerate their schedule. Thus the first issue of the Reflector Shoppers Guide and the first issue of plaintiff’s Advocate appeared on the same day.

Plaintiff distributes The Advocate to substantially all the households in Pitt County. The Reflector Shoppers Guide has had a smaller circulation. Because management regards it as an adjunct to the Daily Reflector, they have distributed it only to households that do not subscribe to the newspaper. They have also offered a combination advertising rate: advertisements that appear in the Daily Reflector can be rerun in the Shoppers Guide at half price. The Shoppers Guide advertising rates are otherwise equal to rates charged by the Daily Reflector. 1

After operating the Reflector Shoppers Guide at a loss for the first year, defendants decided to reduce it from standard newspaper size to tabloid size. A reduction in costs and an increase in revenue followed, and as of February 1973 defendants claimed that their Shoppers Guide was turning a slight profit. The Advocate, whose larger revenue has been consistently absorbed by larger publishing costs, had sustained a $70,000 operating loss by the end of 1972. This lawsuit was the consequence.

The complaint alleges that defendants have deliberately set their advertising rates below cost and have made deceptive statements about their circulation figures 2 in an attempt to eliminate The Advocate from competition. It charges that defendants have entered into a combination and a conspiracy, and have solicited contracts, in restraint of trade under section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1, and that they are guilty of monopolization and an attempt to mo *394 nopolize in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 2. 3 The complaint alleges that these practices have caused plaintiff’s inability to publish the Advocate at a profit, asking for treble damages and injunctive relief.

After the parties had spent about a year in discovery, defendants asked for summary judgment, both on the merits and on the ground that the connection with interstate commerce was too tenuous to sustain a cause of action under the Sherman Act. The district court granted the motion and filed a memorandum opinion. Although the district judge was satisfied that the interstate commerce requirement was lacking, he proceeded to the merits, “construing interstate commerce principles liberally.” He concluded that there was no material factual issue on any of plaintiff’s allegations and that defendants had established they were entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

Interstate Commerce

The evidence on the interstate commerce issue is meager, perhaps because defendants did not raise the argument until just before the deadline'for discovery. 4 Nonetheless, there is enough uncontroverted evidence to prohibit entry of summary judgment on this ground.

The complaint alleges that the Daily Reflector and both shoppers guides carry advertising for local affiliates of national sales organizations such as Ford Motor Company, A & P Food Stores, International Harvester, RCA, and others. Defendants’ answer effectively admits these allegations. The deposition of Lauren Spence Riddick, the Daily Reflector’s “National Advertising Manager,” includes testimony that the newspaper carries an unspecified volume of national advertising furnished by an agency in Atlanta. Mrs. Riddick also testified that the Daily Reflector had notified the Atlanta agency that advertising space was available in the Shoppers Guide, though none had yet been sold. The deposition of Donald Eugene Evans, an advertising salesman for the Daily Reflector, describes the practice of “cooperative advertising.” Mr. Evans *395 testified that national manufacturers sometimes reimburse their local affiliates for advertising campaigns. The record contains no information about the volume or frequency of cooperative advertising carried by the Daily Reflector and no indication whether the Shoppers Guide has sold advertising on a similar basis.

An antitrust plaintiff may establish the necessary connection with interstate commerce in either of two ways: by demonstrating that the alleged anticompetitive conduct occurred in interstate commerce, or by showing that the conduct, though wholly intrastate, had a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Burke v. Ford, 389 U.S. 320, 88 S.Ct. 443, 19 L.Ed.2d 554 (1967); Sun Valley Disposal Co. v. Silver State Disposal Co., 420 F.2d 341 (9th Cir. 1969). In Lorain Journal Co. v. United States, 342 U.S. 143, 72 S.Ct. 181, 96 L. Ed. 162 (1951), the Supreme Court applied the “in commerce” test to a small-town Ohio newspaper. After cataloging the many interstate contacts of both the newspaper and the competing radio station, the Supreme Court settled on a narrow ground of decision. It held:

The distribution within Lorain of the news and advertisements transmitted to Lorain in interstate commerce for the sole purpose of immediate and profitable reproduction and distribution to the reading public is an inseparable part of the flow of the interstate commerce involved.

Id. at 152. The uncontroverted facts on this record demonstrate that the advertising market in Greenville may likewise be a part of interstate commerce for the purpose of the Sherman Act. The only factor that remains to be established is the relative volume of interstate advertising in the Daily Reflector’s business or in the Greenville market. While a “substantial quantity” of national advertising is apparently enough to satisfy the “in commerce” test, Lorain Journal, supra

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Bluebook (online)
496 F.2d 391, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/greenville-publishing-company-inc-v-the-daily-reflector-incorporated-ca4-1974.