On Sunday, September 21, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published on the front page of its local news section a story with this headline: “RJ wins 28 first-place awards in annual journalism contest.” Spread across all five columns, the prominently displayed, 1,185-word-long article about the Nevada Press Foundation honors jumped to most of another page and included 12 photos of beaming staffers working for the state’s most prominent news organization.
A week later, on Sunday, September 28, the RJ published another item about itself. But this one was much harder to find and contained no pictures. It was buried amid classified ads offering furnished rooms for rent (“own bathroom, kitchen use”) in the middle of the seventh section.
In the tiny type of a legal notice, the RJ published data showing another significant yearly paid circulation decline.
Paying RJ readers have now dropped 77% since the current ownership assumed control a decade ago in 2015. This appears to be far worse than the admittedly dismal national trends in the newspaper industry for the same period–even though the local population in Las Vegas has risen by double the national rate. Indeed, the paid circulation is the paper’s lowest in nearly six decades. One has to go way back to 1968 to find a similar number. What was once a market penetration of 60% of all households in its market of Clark County is down to about 7%.
As a newspaperman long before becoming New To Las Vegas, I find this incredibly sad. It’s especially so because the RJ‘s news product recently has shown some signs of life.
In the legal notice, the RJ said its average daily paid print and digital circulation for the year ending August 24 was 53,525: 30,272 printed copies plus 23,253 digital subscriptions. That was a sharp 6.5% drop from the 57,272 listed a year ago. A fall of 6,204 in paid print circulation was only partially offset by a 2,457 rise in online accounts. A mere 10 years ago, the paid circulation was 232,372.
The RJ published the legal notice, officially called the Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation, for one reason: It’s a requirement for having a second-class mailing permit allowing lower postage for postal subscriptions. (In 2019 the paper published the annual statement so full of typos it violated the requirement that it be truthful and, after I pointed that out in this space, published a corrected version a week later.)
There was once a time when the RJ bragged in big house ads about its circulation dominance over the separately owned Las Vegas Sun. That was long before the two papers formed a joint operating agreement to combine non-editorial functions and since, 2005, publish the Sun as a section of the RJ. So technically, the Sun now has the same circulation as the RJ, which no longer can call itself Nevada’s largest newspaper by print circulation (it’s a tie).
It was in that robust circulation year of 2015 that the RJ was purchased–secretly at first–by Sheldon Adelson, the longtime Las Vegas billionaire hotel casino magnate and Republican donor. The price was a stunning $140 million–not a lot less that the $250 million Jeff Bezos had shelled out just two years earlier to buy the several-times-larger, globally influential Washington Post. When Adelson’s identity became known, speculation swelled he was just buying local influence, a cudgel again enemies and insurance against unflattering coverage of his enterprises. It didn’t help that some investigative projects were about rivals of his business interests.
Adelson died in 2021 at age 87. The RJ sent him off with a 10-page special section (George H.W. Bush got only 1½ pages at his death two years earlier) that managed to leave out many aspects of his controversial career. His businesses were essentially inherited by his widow, Miriam Adelson, now 79. The Adelson family 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 RJ likely loses a lot of money, although that could be pocket change to the Adelson family, worth $37.9 billion according to Forbes. Based on the recent sale of the much larger Dallas Morning News to Hearst Corp. for $75 million, the RJ is probably worth only 25% of what the Adelsons paid, if that. This is not only because of the newspaper industry doldrums but also the fact that its joint operating deal with the Sun, owned by the Greenspun family, requires it to pay all the operating costs of the two papers except for the Sun‘s scant editorial staff and hand over a small cut of any cash flow. This probably has become a very bad deal for the Adelsons. The RJ has been in court for years trying to void the agreement, which runs for another 15 years.
Still, there are a number of interesting aspects here. With its 30,272 hard-copy readers, the RJ (and by definition the Sun) probably remains among the country’s 20 largest dailies by paid print circulation. The paper, which has a very conservative editorial page line, is still influential in Nevada, which has just two daily newspapers outside of Las Vegas and only a scattering of online local-news-oriented sites. These include Jon Ralston’s nonpartisan Nevada Independent, the liberal Nevada Current and–an up-and-comer–conservative activist Chuck Muth’s Nevada News and Views. Main competition for news coverage is from the local TV stations, which are of widely varying quality, and national organizations that occasionally swoop in.
By my count of its online directory, the RJ has about 90 editorial staffers. That’s a staffer-to-circulation ratio several times better than what the national average has become in the newspaper business. Sure, a lot of the workers are involved in video and digital production, but the numbers show an effort to get the news out there.
The murder of long-time RJ investigative reporter Jeff German in 2022 by a public official he was writing about gave the paper an enhanced journalistic profile nationally. Since then, my perception is that the RJ in its news pages has tried to go a bit more beyond the daily cacophony of crime events and fatal traffic accidents–still a good bulk of the news report–to explore local matters, sometimes in depth, with less of a political spin than in the earlier days of Adelson ownership.
Nevertheless, it is the tiny, lowly Sun that has won the sole Pulitzer Prize ever given to a Las Vegas news outlet, the 2009 Public Service award for Alexandra Berzon’s exposé about dangerous construction sites along the the Las Vegas Strip. The Sun merrily makes note of this every single day in a banner head across the top of its skinny section: “Las Vegas’s Only Pulitzer-Prize Winning Newspaper.” It’s hard to imagine RJ executives being thrilled about this. Berzon now is at The New York Times.
I invite comments, which can be posted nearby–and anonymously–on my perceptions and observations.
Everyone has heard that old riddle, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Philosophically, of course, the answer is no, as that requires the perception of witnesses. But much the same might be said of newspapers, in Las Vegas and elsewhere, in the steady march toward no readers.
Anonymous, the RJ is only one click behind the New York Daily News, which now has a print circulation of about 35,000. In the late 1940s the Daily News was the country’s largest newspaper, with a daily circulation of 2.4 million.
Surprised, nay, shocked, that the paper ranks among the top 30 nationally in print circ. with a mere 30,000 readers.