The coverage was hard to miss. “RJ sweeps top journalism awards,” screamed the headline stripped across the top of the regional news section cover of the print Las Vegas Review-Journal on Sunday, September 25. The story said the paper took “every top investigative and institutional award in the urban division” of the annual Nevada Press Foundation competition. The story jumped to two inside pages and was adorned by 29 photos of winning staffers. The pictures included Jeff German, the investigative reporter murdered just three weeks earlier allegedly by an elected official he was writing about.
But the previous Sunday’s paper had information at least equally significant about the RJ that was much, much harder to find. It was buried in a legal notice itself buried at the right-bottom corner of page 8-G of the real estate section, near classified ads for a missing parrot, taxi driver openings and the sale of “top XXX DVDs.” In effect the RJ fessed up to yet another year of paid circulation declines, leaving the count at barely a quarter of what it was when present ownership assumed control in 2015, the year before I became New To Las Vegas.
The RJ published the data, officially called the Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation, only because it’s a condition of having a second-class mailing permit allowing lower postage for subscriptions. This is the same kind of government subsidy the paper’s conservative editorial pages regularly bash when offered to, say, ordinary folks in the form of entitlements. (A few years back, the paper published the annual statement so full of typos it violated the requirement that it be truthful and had to publish a corrected version a week later.) Continue reading
