By Mary O’KEEFE

This month we are looking toward the desert, the actual desert, for our News Desert series.

Las Vegas Sun is a 75-year-old publication that was started by Hank Greenspun.

“That was a completely different world when it started,” said Brian Greenspun, Hank’s son, in an interview with CVW. “You talk about news desert; it was all desert.”

In 1950 at the time the existing newspaper, which is now the Review Journal, had locked out its printers and typesetters, said Greenspun.

“And what was typical back then was the typesetting union would start what it called a ‘free press’ newspaper just to keep the printers [working] during the strike,” Greenspun said.

The printers couldn’t keep the free press – called Las Vegas Free Press – going on their own.

“And that’s when they found my dad,” he said. “He bought the newspaper from them and turned it into a daily newspaper just to keep the printers working.”

Not long after Hank purchased the paper he changed the name to Las Vegas Sun and turned it into a daily paper. It is still a daily paper.

The family has expanded its media muscle to the Greenspun Media Group: Las Vegas, which includes Las Vegas Weekly and Las Vegas Magazine.

“It’s in a joint operating agreement with the Review Journal now,” he said.

It has been part of a joint operating agreement for several years though it is one that, in the last about five years, has not been going well leading to a legal dispute.

Las Vegas Sun is distributed in the Review Journal but since a new owner, the Adelson family, bought the Review Journal things have changed.

“The Las Vegas Sun is included in the Review Journal package as its own separate newspaper. So they’re delivered together,” Greenspun said. “We have basically 10 pages every day of the Las Vegas Sun that’s delivered in a package that includes the Review Journal and the Sun.”

That arrangement has been going on since 2005; prior to that, since 1990, each paper was delivered separately. In 2005 the joint operating agreement was reached.

The Adelson family purchased the paper in 2016 and to say the two publications view journalism differently is an understatement.

The Las Vegas Sun alleges in its antitrust lawsuit that the Review Journal is “engaged in improper accounting practices that denied the Sun its share of profit payments,” according to an article in the Sun in April 2024.

So in addition to working to keep independent news alive, independent and factually based, Greenspun is also in a David vs. Goliath fight for its financial existence.

Greenspun Media does represent a large portion of the social and political thought of the area, he said.

“We have a lot of community support, high community readership because [it is] interested in our point of view and interested in the stories we run,” he said.

He wasn’t saying that the Review Journal doesn’t have its own audience – it does – but the two papers represent America in general.

With the battle between these two papers – the Review Journal has a lot of money behind it and the Sun works every day to survive – the question is “Why keep up the battle?”

“Why do any of us keep doing this?” Greenspun asked. “I grew up in Las Vegas. I grew up in the newspaper business. I grew up with this belief that it’s my community and I have to do all that I can, the way I know how to do it, to make the community prosper, grow and progress. And my way of doing that is through the written word. It’s through the newspaper.”

He added that he feels this independent newspaper is a legacy commitment.

“I feel this responsibility and my wife shares it. This community has been very good to me and my family. We have a responsibility, as long as we can do it, to stick around and at the very least counterbalance this craziness that’s coming out of the other newspapers,” he said.

One of the values of independent news, and one of the reasons CVW wanted to do this series, is the hometown stories that don’t make it on national news. When these communities get their 15 minutes of national attention – and when the cameras and reporters move on to the other stories – independent newspaper publications stay. Our memories are much longer than 15 minutes.

One of those examples is the Oct. 1, 2017 shooting that occurred in Las Vegas. A shooter opened fire on people who were attending Route 91 Harvest music festival. The shooter killed 60 people and wounded 413. That grabbed national news and on occasion, when another shooting occurs in the nation, the Las Vegas shooting is mentioned but usually only as a footnote. But on Oct. 1, 2024 the Las Vegas Sun paid tribute to the memory of those who had been killed and those who had survived because for them this happened in their town … and their memories do not fade.