Welcome to From the Archives! Each week, this newsletter will look back at a story from our 32-plus years of archives—and explain why that story is worth revisiting today. If you don’t want to get this free newsletter in your inbox each Monday, click “unsubscribe” down below. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy!
Thirty-two years ago, the RN&R was not yet called the RN&R. In November 1993, three local journalists named Mike Norris, Bill Martin and Larry Henry founded what was then called Nevada Weekly (a name the publication would have until February 1995, when the paper became the Reno News & Review).
The Jan. 5-11, 1994, issue was either the seventh or eighth issue of Nevada Weekly. (We think it was the seventh; the bound volume of papers from those days doesn’t include what would have been the Dec. 29, 1993-Jan. 4, 1994 issue. We presume they took that week between Christmas and New Year’s off, but we can’t say for sure.) The cover story in that Jan. 5 issue focused on problems with groundwater in Nevada—but the story we’re focusing on today can be found on Page 11, next to an article on Washoe County Commission spending, as well as advertisements for Model Dairy and Adele’s.
The piece, headlined “Gazette-Journal hires new political writer,” was written by Larry Henry, and it focuses on a name with which you’re likely familiar.
The story:
In a sharp departure from two decades of progressively deemphasizing political coverage, the Reno Gazette-Journal was scheduled yesterday to begin publishing a weekly column by veteran Las Vegas political journalist Jon Ralston.
Newsroom managers at the Gazette-Journal, one of about six dozen newspapers owned and operated by the suburban Washington, D.C.-based Gannett Corp., have in the past rejected several proposals by their own staff reporters to add a political column to the paper.
Courtney Brenn, the Gazette-Journal’s current reporter assigned to politics at the Gazette, praised the decision to hire Ralston.
“We’ve needed this for a long time,” she said.
Both of the Las Vegas dailies—the Review-Journal and the Sun—have long published political columns, which are closely read by leaders throughout the state.
Ralston formerly wrote a three times a week column for the Review-Journal but left the paper in 1992 to publish a $400-a-year political newsletter called The Ralston Report. He continues to write a free-lance column for the Review-Journal.
Ralston won’t say how many newsletter subscribers he has, but he maintains that roughly a quarter are in northern Nevada, and now that his work will begin appearing in the Gazette, Ralston says he plans on visiting northern Nevada at least one a month.
Marketing surveys conducted by the Gazette’s parent company, Gannett Inc., have indicated that readers pay comparatively little attention to political and public affairs stories. Based on theses surveys and a marketing-based journalism philosophy promoted by the Gannett Corp., political coverage was gradually reduced in favor of softer features.
Executive Editor Ward Bushee could not be reached, but Las Vegas Sun columnist Jeff German theorized the Gazette’s new interest in hiring Ralston was partly due to increased competition in political reporting in the Truckee Meadows.
“Why else would they bring in someone who’s not even familiar with northern Nevada politics?” German asked.
During the 1993 legislative session, the Gazette-Journal published its own political newsletter. A number of subscribers complained they were being forced to pay two bills (one for daily delivery of the paper and one for weekly mail delivery of the insert) for coverage they believed should have been a part of the daily newspaper.
As the old saying goes: The more things change, the more things stay the same, and while Nevada has (massive understatement alert!) changed a LOT in the last 32 years, Jon Ralston remains one of Nevada’s most influential journalists. He’s the founder and CEO of the excellent statewide news website The Nevada Independent—and in the coming days, you’ll likely hear a LOT about his much-anticipated new book.
On Jan. 20, Simon & Schuster will release The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight, Ralston’s biography on the late Nevada senator, who arguably became the most powerful Nevadan ever, when he served as the U.S. Senate majority leader from 2007-2015.
—Jimmy Boegle
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