The only remaining daily print newspaper of note in Las Vegas certainly knows how to brag. “Review-Journal shines at Nevada press awards,” proclaimed a width-of-the-page headline on the front of the local news section on Sunday, September 27. The breathless story, which jumped to a full inside page, recounted a plethora of honors and included 20 photos of the wining worthies. All hail the king of Nevada print media!
What the RJ doesn’t seem to know, however, is how to sell. A week later, on Sunday, October 4, the paper buried a perhaps more significant item about itself. It ran on the fourth page of the sixth section two columns over from a classified ad placed by a man “seeking a loving woman for marriage.”
The item was the required annual legal notice about circulation, and the news definitely was not good. In a year, the RJ reported, its paid circulation–print and digital combined–had dropped another 6½%. The count now stands at its lowest point in six decades, since the days when known mobsters still strutted the Las Vegas Strip and Caesars Palace was the big shiny new kid on the block. What once was a market penetration upwards of 80% of all households in the RJ‘s primary circulation zone of Clark County has shriveled way under 7%.
Since the RJ‘s present ownership took over in 2015, the paper’s paid circulation has dropped a whopping 78½%. Now, almost all newspapers everywhere have been suffering since the Internet and Craigslist came along in a double-whammy wave of creative destruction to strip newspapers of their lucrative local classified advertising monopolies, and online-only news sites of their editorial dominance. But the RJ‘s showing is materially worse that the estimated 60% drop in a decade for total U.S. daily newspaper paid circulation.
Plus this. According to my reading of data compiled by the United Kingdom’s Press Gazette, the RJ is now roughly the U.S.’s 20th largest daily newspaper by paid circulation. This is not an untarnished silver lining. That’s because according to my reading of data on pulitzer.org, the RJ has become the largest U.S. newspaper never to have won nor been a finalist for a prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Continue reading
