Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 22, 2024
With Election Day just six weeks off, the presidential race is a dead heat. That’s especially true here in Nevada, that giant morass of mountains, desert and casinos considered one of the Seven Swing States. The latest poll, from Emerson College/The Hill, shows Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald J. Trump tied at 47% each for the Silver State’s six electoral votes. The candidates clearly need all the local influencers they can get to proclaim their virtues as loudly as possible.
Which is why a legal notice buried at the bottom of page 5-G in yesterday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, the state’s most formidable newspaper and a long-time bullhorn for Trump, spells big local trouble for The Donald. The notice was the paper’s legally required once-a-year sworn statement of circulation.
The data showed that the RJ‘s paid print circulation has fallen to its lowest level in six decades! Even including digital subscriptions, the total paid circulation is the lowest in five decades!
Put another way, less than 7% of the households in the RJ’s main market area of Clark County–home to an overwhelming 78% of Nevada’s population–will be directly exposed to the RJ‘s loud clamor of editorials, cartoons and columns beating the drum for the one-time President. Six decades ago, such a din would have reached 60% of the households.
The RJ reported that its average paid print circulation for the 12 months ending in mid-August was only 36,476, a level that might surprise some local folks. That was an 8.5% drop–3,407 copies daily–from the 39,883 reported for the same period a year earlier. Paid digital subscriptions picked up only a part of that drop, rising by 1,509 from 19,287 to 20,796. The bottom line: Total paid circulation print and digital fell 3.1% from 59,096 to 57,272.
As recently as 2015, the RJ reported its paid circulation was a hefty 232,372. So what we’re seeing now is a stunning 75% drop in just nine years despite a solid increase in population. Sure, it’s been a hard time for almost all newspapers, but nationally, the drop over that period has been only 45%. Still, the RJ probably remains among the county’s 25 largest dailies by paid circulation.
Thanks to the magic of digitized newspaper collections, I’ve collected the RJ‘s very own sworn circulation statements back to the 1950’s, long before I became New to Las Vegas. I had to go all the way back to 1963–heart of the the mob rule era in Las Vegas–to find a paid daily print circulation comparable to this year’s. The circulation that year was 35,441, at a time when the county’s population was only about 150,000 and not the 2.3 million it is today. And I had to go back 52 years, to pre-Internet 1972, to find a daily paid circulation comparable to this year’s print and digital total. The total daily circulation I calculated that year from separate weekday and Sunday figures was 57,747, at a time when the county’s population was still only 275,000.
As it turns out, it was in that robust circulation year of 2015 that the RJ was purchased–secretly at first–by Sheldon Adelson, a longtime Las Vegas billionaire hotel casino magnate and Republican donor. The price was so high–$140 million–that speculation immediately ensued that Adelson was really buying local influence, a cudgel again enemies and insurance against unflattering coverage of his enterprises.
The paper’s editorial page heartily backed Trump in 2016 and 2020, who lost the state both times. Adelson died in 2021 at age 87. The family business was essentially inherited by his widow, Miriam Adelson, now 78, an Israeli-born doctor who shares her husband’s great fondness for Trump. (During his time in office, he awarded her a Presidential Medal of Honor.). The Adelson family quickly sold off its Las Vegas entertainment holdings, including the Venetian, the Palazzo, and the Sands Expo and Convention Center, but held on to the RJ.
The newspaper today likely loses big coin and, aside from the presses and real estate, is probably not worth one-tenth the purchase price. But Forbes says the Adelson family is worth $32 billion, so it can easily ride out this election year, and a few more. Also according to Forbes, Adelson herself this year has donated nearly $6 million to Trump campaign entities. Despite its losses, the RJ remains the state’s best-staffed and most visible print news organization.
Technically, the RJ has the identical circulation as the Las Vegas Sun, an independently owned daily newspaper distributed as a ad-free section within the R-J, part of a long-standing and increasingly contentious joint operating agreement. The news and editorial products are separate, but the RJ runs the business side. The editorial page of the Sun, owned by the Greenspun family and run with a minimal staff, is as fervently pro-Harris as the RJ’s is pro-Trump, but the paper is marginalized. To me the truth is that the two papers, who have been suing each other for years over business issues and profit participations, have not really shown they can move public opinion when it comes to the hurling of editorial invective.
All of Nevada has only two other daily newspapers. The rest of the Las Vegas media scene is pretty barren on matters of public affairs aside from the online news site The Nevada Independent, which does not back candidates, and a few partisan websites without much traffic. The local TV stations dabble by covering breaking news and some political rallies, but don’t opine.
So the 2024 presidential election should be a tremendous opportunity for the RJ in the service of its political favorite. But it’s hard to be an effective influencer when most of the influencees has gone away.