KVIG Informative

The Las Vegas Review-Journal stopped printing its rival newspaper this spring. A federal judge just confirmed the Review-Journal doesn’t have to start again — leaving the last agreement of its kind in the country effectively dead.

U.S. District Judge Anne Traum declined to order the Las Vegas Review-Journal to resume printing and distributing the Las Vegas Sun, rejecting an emergency request from the Sun as the two newspapers’ long-running legal dispute heads toward trial.

The Review-Journal stopped printing the Sun as an insert in April, ending an arrangement that traced back to a 1989 joint operating agreement, later amended in 2005, under a 1970 federal law originally designed to preserve competing newspapers in the same city by letting them share printing and business operations while keeping separate newsrooms.

Traum ruled that if the Sun is printed by the Review-Journal again, it would have to be as a separate afternoon newspaper under the terms of the original 1989 agreement, rather than the morning insert format the two papers had used since 2005.

The Review-Journal is owned by News+Media Capital Group, controlled by the family of the late Sheldon Adelson and his widow, Miriam Adelson. Review-Journal ownership sought to end the joint operating agreement in 2019; the Sun’s ownership responded with a lawsuit alleging the move violated federal antitrust law, a case that is still pending.

The Sun has continued publishing primarily through its digital platform since the print arrangement ended, while the underlying antitrust case between the two papers proceeds toward a trial date.

Nevada’s joint operating agreement was considered the last of its kind still operating in the United States before the dispute began, a structure that once existed in multiple American cities specifically to prevent local newspaper monopolies.

A federal law written half a century ago to stop one newspaper from controlling an entire city’s news coverage just failed to stop exactly that outcome in Las Vegas. The Review-Journal doesn’t have to print its rival. Whether the Sun survives as anything more than a website is now a question for a trial date that hasn’t been set.