Soon, here comes the judge in Las Vegas newspaper litigation

Posted on by May 14, 2026
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The hearings have been held and almost all the briefs are in. It will be up to a federal judge in Nevada to decide if the Las Vegas Sun will ever see the light of print again. A ruling could come soon. In my view, it’s a loooong shot for the 76-year-old daily newspaper.

To recap: In 2019 the Sun, owned by founder kin Brian Greenspun, sued its business partner, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, owned by the mega-multi-billion-dollar Adelson family, claiming violations of federal antitrust laws. In 1989 the two papers had entered into a Joint Operating Agreement under which the RJ would handle advertising, printing and circulation for both papers while sending the Sun a small cut of cash flow to cover its editorial costs for an separate publication. In 2005 JOA arrangements were changed to make the Sun a daily ad-free section within the RJ. The JOA was set to expire in 2040.

All this happened amid the meltdown in newspaper revenues thanks to online sources like Craigslist, which siphoned away lucrative classified ads. In 2020 I estimated in this space that the Las Vegas JOA was losing $10 million a year. Remarkably, that figure was later confirmed by an RJ executive in open-court testimony. But it really was no surprise; even counting new digital subscribers, circulation of the RJ has declined 77% under Adelson ownership.

Earlier this year, Anne R. Traum, the patient federal district judge hearing the matter in Las Vegas (although she is based in Reno), gave the Sun the latest in a series of injunctions requiring the RJ to continue printing the Sun pending outcome of the federal litigation. But the RJ won a ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco voiding the injunction as well as the JOA. The reason: That 2005 change in the JOA required permission of the U.S. Attorney General, which was never given. After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the Sun‘s appeal, the RJ daringly stopped printing the Sun on April 3. That led to the present flurry of legal activity in which the Sun, which is still online, seeks another must-print injunction. Two days of hearings took place last month. Greenspun testified he doesn’t have the wherewithal to finance the print product on his own. Continue reading →

From Las Vegas: boom, bubble, bust–250 years of American history in just three words (Part 1)

Posted on by May 13, 2026
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boom bubble bust

Declaration of Independence

With the semiquincentennial of the United States hard at hand, everyone, it seems, is opining on the history of the United States over the past 250 years. Much of the commentary touches on race and inequality, which certainly is fair enough.

So why not me? I’m a long-time financial journalist and a serious student of history since my days at dear old Rutgers. Accordingly, I offer my two cents explaining the course of American events since our official founding with the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Here’s the Cliffs Notes version: Boom, bubble and bust. To me, New To Las Vegas, a place where for many gamblers it’s BB&B every day, it’s that simple.

Since John Hancock penned his famous signature on that famous parchment, the U.S. has experienced dozens of boom-bubble-and-bust cycles. They have been of various durations and intensities, lasting on average about five years. Some now are more famous than others. Indeed, the U.S. has rarely gone more than a half-decade without being caught up in a BB&B. Their patterns are remarkably similar. In my view, we’re clearly in yet another bubble right now.

Not every downturn has been caused by a bubble. Over time, the booms and bubbles have been more than the busts. So the net result of all the completed cycles have benefited the overall American economy. But not everyone in it, and not equally. It’s often been the Federal Governmental response–essentially encouraging the booms and bubbles, then trying to deal with the fallout from the busts in a way that protects the rich far more than the poor–that has helped create the great political and economic divide we now have in our country.

It’s the same old story.The history of BB&Bs explains most everything and provides lessons for today. So let’s start a loooong walk down Forgotten Memory Lane. Continue reading →

Las Vegas plays a key role for another Pulitzer Prize winner

Posted on by May 6, 2026
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In 2024 I wrote in this space about how far-away reporters won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting about events that happened in the Las Vegas area. A team from Reuters writing about the nefarious business activities of Elon Musk described a suburban Las Vegas office of his Tesla devoted to talking Tesla buyers out of demanding better battery performance for their electric vehicles. That Reuters story is still online (click here). A follow-up at the end of my post noted that the article about the prestigious Pulitzers in the next day’s Las Vegas Review-Journal made no mention of the big story reported out under its very nose.

This year, we have a variation on this theme of no coverage. The annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced in New York on Monday. The story about the awards in the print edition of the next day’s RJ–now the country’s second largest newspaper never to have won one–made reference in some manner to 12 of the 15 journalism and special citation awards (another eight were given for arts and letters). As it happens, one of the three awards not referenced by the RJ concerned material rather unfavorable to the billionaire Adelson family, which has owned the paper since 2015.

Mark Lamster, the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News, won the Criticism award for, in the words of the citation, “using wit and expertise to amplify his opinions and advocate for city residents.” A lot of those opinions expressed heated opposition to a proposal to tear down the striking, nearly half-century-old I.M. Pei-designed Dallas City Hall and replace it with a government-subsidized basketball arena to house the Dallas Mavericks. The team is majority owned by the Adelsons, whose monied members live in Las Vegas. Continue reading →

Another dubious Las Vegas news site surfaces

Posted on by April 18, 2026
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Las Vegas TodaySix years ago I wrote about a highly questionable online news site that went by the name of  Las Vegas Herald. “First published 1900,” it declared on its website. This was an obviously bogus claim since the population of Las Vegas then was only 18 (the city would not even come into existence until 1905). The site consisted of rewritten press releases and occasional stories under what seems to be phony bylines. Even before AI was well known, I suspected computers played a big role in generating the copy.

I discovered “Las Vegas Herald” was part of a worldwide network of websites with similar, almost legit-sounding names run by an organization in New Delhi, India. Its unexpected goal, I wrote then, was to “amplify favorable coverage about India and negative coverage about Pakistan.”

“Las Vegas Herald” is still around (I refuse to link to it). But now there’s a new dubious entry in the Las Vegas-as-a-pit-stop-in-sketchy-news-enterprises business. It’s called “Las Vegas Today.” It’s part of a network of sites owned by a PR firm that steals journalism produced by legitimate operations.

Futurism, a respected New York City-based tech news website, published a story yesterday blowing the lid off the collection of more than 50 websites branded as National Today. The lengthy article by Maggie Harrison Dupré flatly called the operation a “plagiarism machine” filching “original journalism at incredible scale,” with no credit to the original authors or writers. Much of National Today’s copy appears generated by AI, which means it contains errors. Although not specifically mentioned in the story, “Las Vegas Today” is one of those websites. (I am grateful to CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter for highlighting the Futurism story.) Continue reading →