In Las Vegas, Innovation Defines Online

The city of Las Vegas has long had a colorful history. Now, with one of the most innovative newspaper sites in the country and another paper aggressively hunting copyright violators, this town just might have one of the flashiest online media markets in the country as well.

The largest newspaper in town, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, uses a proxy to aggressively sue other Web sites for allegedly posting its stories without permission. Righthaven LLC -- a company the Review-Journal said it “grubstaked” and contracted with -- has sued at least 250 sites for copyright infringement so far, according to righthavenlawsuits.com, a Web site that tracks the litigation.

Meanwhile, the town’s second major newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun, now exists only as an ad-less insert in its major competitor, the Review-Journal. Under a joint operating agreement, the larger paper prints and distributes the Sun every day.

The Sun has adapted to this reduced state by using its 8-page ink edition (10 pages on Sunday) to publish longer, in-depth pieces, leaving all the local breaking news for its Web site, according to Rob Curley, senior editor of digital for the Sun and its owner, the Greenspun Media Group.

This arrangement means the Sun’s site, lasvegassun.com, doesn't have to worry about publishing something that might hurt the print edition’s circulation or advertising, Curley said. “That makes the Web site the most interesting newspaper Web site in the country,” he boasted, citing as proof the awards won by the Sun in the last two years: the Pulitzer Prize, DuPont-Columbia University Award, Editor & Publisher’s EPpy Award and an Online News Association award.

The derring-do has apparently carried over to the Sun’s tech side, with recent Web site innovations that use sophisticated audience targeting strategies.

And all this is happening in a market far from the nation’s media centers of Los Angeles, Washington and New York. The market ranks 38^th in terms of population, with just under 2 million people, according to media research and consulting firm Borrell Associates Inc. Local advertisers spent $645.7 million here in 2010, according to Borrell, with such spending expected to grow to $821.9 million by 2015.

Of the local total, online advertising accounted for $88 million in 2010, according to Borrell. That total is expected to grow to $146.8 million by 2015, said Borrell.

While the intensity of the competition between the Sun and the Review-Journal may be a bit surprising given the Sun’s captive status, the Review-Journal’s (or more accurately, Righthaven’s) legal attacks on other Web sites is the most riveting journalistic phenomenon here.

The Review-Journal’s site, lvrj.com, dominates the market, with 28.3% of adults checking in at least once a month, according to The Media Audit, an audience tracking firm in Houston. (Curley argues that the Sun has better demographics, with a more affluent and better-educated audience.) Its closest competitors, the Web sites for the local Fox and CBS TV stations, lured 13.8% and 11.9%, respectively, according to The Media Audit.

Given its position as the big dog in town, criticism of the Review-Journal’s efforts to punish much smaller sites and bloggers was perhaps a given.

According to court filings, Righthaven scours the Web for postings that make use of Review-Journal stories, acquires copyrights for those stories from the paper, then sues for copyright infringement in U.S. District Court. In the lawsuits, Righthaven not only asks for statutory damages (as opposed to actual ones), it also demands the Web site’s domain, an unusual remedy that -- if granted -- essentially would put an offending site out of business.

“Everyone I’ve talked to and everybody I’ve seen quoted thinks this is a fairly ridiculous approach,” said Stephen Bates, an assistant professor of journalism specializing in First Amendment law at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, referring to Righthaven’s rush to court without first asking sites to stop using the material or get permission.

Then there is the fact that some suits have been filed against the paper’s own sources after those sources posted complimentary articles or ones mentioning their name.

Among the sued is a former U.S. Senate candidate endorsed by the paper, Sharron Angle, who got in trouble for posting a favorable Review-Journal editorial on her site. The Democratic Party of Nevada has been sued, as well as Matt Drudge, creator of the well-known site that bears his name. Also among the targeted: a former mob enforcer often quoted in organized crime stories by a R-J columnist. His crime: republishing those articles on his blog.

“That’s obviously pretty outrageous -- to sue your own sources,” Bates said.

So far, several sites have settled with Righthaven for between $2,000 and $6,000 -- a fraction of the maximum $150,000 possible in such cases -- and kept their domains, according to an amicus curiae brief filed last month by the Media Bloggers Association in support of a Web site defendant.