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.
Anyway, here are the numbers. The RJ says its average daily paid circulation for the 12-month period ending August 23 was 50,025, roughly evenly divided between print and digital. The number a year ago was 53,525. A modest 574 increase in digital subscribers was wiped out and then some by a 4,124 drop in print subscribers. (In case anyone is wondering, the RJ‘s circulation in 1967 was 50,870. This is according to my analysis of a house ad with daily and Sunday numbers the paper published August 1, 1967, on page 15, a copy of which sits in my office, courtesy of the UNLV library.)
The RJ published its most recent legal notice with the data, officially called the Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation, for just one reason: It’s a requirement for having a second-class mailing permit allowing lower postage for postal subscriptions. (In 2019 the RJ published the annual statement so full of typos it violated the requirement that it be truthful. After I pointed that out in this space, the paper published a corrected version a week later.)
A mere 11 years ago, the RJ‘s paid circulation–essentially all print–was a heady 232,372. That was the year that Sheldon Adelson, the longtime Las Vegas billionaire hotel casino magnate and Republican donor, bought the paper–secretly at first. 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 rated 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 80. The Adelson family sold off its Las Vegas entertainment holdings, including the Venetian, the Palazzo, and the Sands Expo and Convention Center, But the Adelsons held on to the RJ, which dates back to 1909, just four years after Las Vegas was founded as a railroad division point on the new line being built through the Mojave Desert from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City.
As it turned out, Adelson bought at the financial peak. By 2020, four years after becoming New To Las Vegas, I estimated the paper was losing $10 million a year—a number actually confirmed this year by an RJ executive in open court. It might not matter; Forbes estimates the Adelson family is now worth $33.5 billion, the 33d biggest stash in the U.S..
The RJ likely still loses money, but deficits definitely have been cut. One reason is that the RJ‘s printing compound–a hulking fortress along Bonanza Road in downtown Las Vegas–now also prints the daily newspapers in Phoenix and Tucson, which are then trucked hundreds of miles away, giving readers there often dated news.
A bigger reason is the RJ‘s decision in early April to stop printing its erstwhile rival, the Las Vegas Sun, which had a joint operating agreement dating back to 1989 and designed to run until 2040. In exchange for handing over a small cut of the cash flow, the RJ bore all the business and circulation costs of both papers except the Sun‘s editorial operation. Designed to preserve competing editorial voices when one paper is on the rocks (as the Sun was), a JOA is an exception to federal antitrust laws.
Originally the two papers were printed separately–the RJ in the morning and the Sun in the afternoon. In 2005, the JOA was revamped so the Sun appeared as a ad-free section in the RJ. Over time, the Sun’s editorial product withered away, but not before the paper managed to grab the 2009 Pulitzer Public Service award for Alexandra Berzon’s exposé about dangerous construction sites along the Strip. Editorially, the Sun, owned by Brian Greenspun, son of Hank Greenspun, who founded the paper in 1950, was far more liberal than the arch-conservative RJ.
But in 2019 fils made what now looks like a bad decision.
As part of long-running legal skirmishing between the two papers, Brian Greenspun sued his long-time business partner in federal court for violating the very same federal antitrust law that allowed the two papers to rake it in for decades. As I wrote back them, I likened the lawsuit to a bank robber suing for a division of the spoils. My headline: “In Las Vegas, no honor among newspaper co-monopolists.” I didn’t think the Sun had much of a federal case. As I wrote earlier this year, live by the hoard, die by the hoard.
The RJ fought back. Its lawyers developed evidence that the 2005 JOA amendment throwing the Sun into the RJ (agreed to by earlier owners of the RJ) never had received the blessing of the U.S. Attorney General, arguably a requirement of the JOA law, which Congress passed in 1970.
Earlier this year, Anne R. Traum, the Reno-based federal district judge hearing the matter in Las Vegas, gave the Sun the latest in a series of injunctions requiring the RJ to continue printing the Sun pending outcome of the litigation. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco completely bought the RJ‘s argument and voided the injunction as well as the existing JOA.
After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the Sun‘s appeal, the RJ daringly stopped printing the Sun on April 3. The Sun raced back to court claiming that the original 1989 JOA is somehow still in effect and Traum should issue another injunction ordering the RJ to resume printing the Sun, perhaps even as a separate publication. A two-day hearing was, during which Greenspun–a rich man, but not Adelson rich–testified he doesn’t have the wherewithal to finance the print product on his own.
Everyone is waiting to Traum to issue an opinion and ruling, which could come at any time. The RJ surely would be on the next plane to San Francisco with its notice of appeal if ordered to resume printing the Sun. One interesting option for Traum would be to deny the request for an injunction but allow the case to proceed toward a trial on money damages at some distant date. That, of course, wouldn’t bring back the printed Sun, which has continued to put out a pretty-much-ignored product online.
I invite comments on my perceptions and observations, which can be posted nearby–and anonymously, if desired.
Now I suppose it’s great to win a boatload of daily newspaper prizes in Nevada. But the RJ is Nevada’s largest daily newspaper by far. There actually are remaining only three other much-smaller print dailies (one of which, the Reno Gazette-Journal, won the editorial writing Pulitzer Prize in 1977). So it’s a little bit like being crowned king of an nearly empty island.