EDITORIAL: Why the Review-Journal has stopped printing the Las Vegas Sun

EDITORIAL: Why the Review-Journal has stopped printing the Las Vegas Sun Today, for the first time in more than 20 years, readers will not find a printed Las Vegas Sun insert inside the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper. This action is a result of 6½ years of litigation between the newspapers, precipitated by the Sun. The dispute went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, with the Review-Journal prevailing decisively. The Review-Journal announced the start of its fight in this space in August 2019, explaining in an editorial the many reasons why we wanted to end our business relationship with the Sun. While we believe all those claims remain true today, we have stopped printing the Sun because a meritless antitrust claim brought by the Sun led a court to rule the agreement never received proper federal approval in the first place. In short, we are no longer printing the Sun because the courts have twice declared it would be unlawful for us to continue doing so. We have arrived at this point because the Sun falsely claimed in its lawsuit that the newspapers’ 2005 joint operating arrangement, negotiated by the Sun and the Review-Journal’s previous owners, was approved by the U.S. Justice Department. The Review-Journal subsequently discovered the agreement was never approved by the U.S. attorney general, as required under the 1970 Newspaper Preservation Act. Without that approval, the agreement is “unenforceable,” according to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The U.S. Supreme Court looked at the case and let that ruling stand. The 9th Circuit reaffirmed that ruling in a subsequent order this week. The U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, as required by the two separate 9th Circuit rulings, has dissolved the injunctions that required the Review-Journal and Sun to continue performing the unlawful agreement. For decades, the two newspapers combined their business, advertising, production and distribution operations under the Review-Journal’s roof, and at the Review-Journal’s cost, while maintaining separate newsrooms. The Sun wanted the court to force the continuation of the partnership for 14 more years, until 2040. No more. Contrary to whatever complaining you might hear from the Sun’s leadership and legal representation, the disappearance of the Sun insert from this newspaper does not put the Sun out of business or silence what’s left of its “voice,” long atrophied from lack of use. The Sun maintains a news website. It has a few hundred thousand followers across social media platforms. And the Sun remains free to produce and print a newspaper on its own, find advertisers willing to sponsor it, and sell and deliver the newspaper any way it sees fit. We encourage them to do so. The Review-Journal competes with countless sources of news and entertainment, but we would welcome one more. We just don’t want to foot the bill. It is time the Sun stood up on its own two feet. This fight was never about the Review-Journal “silencing” the Sun. Our litigation sought to end a structurally deficient, economically unsustainable, not to mention legally unenforceable agreement that forced the Review-Journal to subsidize and print the Sun while the Sun brazenly took actions that we think undermined the partnership. The Sun made a mockery of the Newspaper Preservation Act, the pre-internet law that aimed to preserve multiple editorial voices in a community. Instead of using its ample pages to publish local news of importance and amplify its editorial voice, the Sun consistently surrendered space in its insert to New York Times stories, plus editorials already published by other news organizations. On March 4, for example, rather than publish local opinion, the Sun insert ran an editorial from the Journal-Advocate, a small newspaper in Sterling, Colorado (population 13,000), with the headline, “Don’t wait, schedule a colonoscopy today.” Was the subject too complex for a member of the Sun’s editorial board to research and present in a persuasive fashion? At one point, the Sun launched a campaign to discourage readers from subscribing to the Review-Journal — and under the terms of the agreement, the Review-Journal had no choice but to print and distribute the Sun insert with that campaign. The Sun’s lack of quality led the Review-Journal to seek help from the courts. The Sun was already suing the Review-Journal, starting the legal process that led, through twists and turns, to the Review-Journal realizing and the courts agreeing that the arrangement between the parties was unlawful and unenforceable. In our papers, we asked a court to rule that the Sun was not meeting its contractual obligation to produce a high-quality metropolitan print newspaper. We continue to believe the Sun was in breach of the companies’ partnership, undermining the overall quality of the combined Review-Journal/Sun print edition, and undermining the interests of the community itself and the public trust placed in local news organizations. It seems these claims will never get to a jury, since the agreement is unenforceable, but we believe we would have won that argument, too. Like every joint newspaper arrangement before, the RJ-Sun partnership had collapsed. Once there were almost 30 such joint operating arrangements in the United States. But news consumers steadily moved away from newspapers and switched to news websites and smartphone apps, social media, email newsletters and other digital platforms. One by one, the arrangements ceased to be adequately profitable, failed and disappeared. By 2019, when the Review-Journal sought to end its agreement with the Sun, the deal was one of only five such arrangements remaining in the country. By January of this year, the RJ-Sun joint operating agreement was the last of its kind. And then there were none. The Sun’s antitrust claim against the Review-Journal rests on the laughable notion that newspapers do not compete against other news sources. Only a newspaper that doesn’t try to compete at all could concoct such an absurd argument with a straight face. If the Sun decides to try to take journalism seriously again, it can look to our product for guidance. We won’t hold our breath. After all, before the Sun filed its baseless antitrust lawsuit, Sun Publisher and Editor Brian Greenspun pursued a joint operating agreement buyout from the owners of the Review-Journal, declaring his desire to snuff out the Sun, thereby “ending my commitment to Las Vegas through a daily newspaper.” After his inflated price wasn’t met, Greenspun chased a prolific payday through protracted litigation. It won’t work. What does this mean for you, our readers? You have our promise that every part of our operation will do the best that it can, every day, to bring you timely local news about crime, business, politics and government, entertainment, sports and more, together with critically important regional, national and international news. We will provide the state’s best investigative and watchdog journalism. We will fight for your right to know what your governments are doing with your money — and go to court to protect that right, when necessary. And we will deliver the news where you want it, whether that’s on your driveway, your smartphone, your big-screen TV or anywhere else. We don’t dare predict what the news business might look like 10 or 20 years from now, but we feel safe making you this promise: The Review-Journal will remain the best and most trusted source of local news for Las Vegas. The views expressed above are those of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.