Week of June 18, 2026

From the editor’s desk

A new reader who signed up for our email newsletters wrote to ask about something that had caught his eye—the RN&R’s Cathedral City, Calif., mailing address.

“Just curious,” he wrote. “Why is a newsletter about Reno not in Reno? Better yet? It’s not even in Nevada.”

I see why this detail would raise his concern. An out-of-state address could have been the tip of an alarming iceberg. Given that around 3,500 U.S. newspapers have closed since 2005, plenty of shady operators have swooped in to prey on a struggling industry—causing a lot of havoc and deception. Sometimes, it’s really not clear who is providing you with information.

One major problem is that hedge funds have been buying up newspapers just to gut them. In 2025, North Carolina’s Mercury Local explained the nature and scope of this problem very clearly in a report with a telling headline—“How Private Equity Gutted Local Newspapers: A Data-Driven Autopsy”:

Private-equity firms do not buy newspapers for journalism. They buy distressed cash flow, pile on debt, harvest fees, and exit before the presses seize. In 2024, hedge funds and PE groups controlled an estimated one-third of U.S. daily circulation. 

If you’d like more detail on this practice, a 2023 documentary film, Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink, tells the story of hedge fund Alden Global Capital buying up hundreds of U.S. newspapers. You can watch the trailer on this episode of Democracy Now or the full film on PBS.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the phenomenon of what some call “pink slime journalism” (yes, it’s named after the ground beef filler), which Wikipedia describes like this:

Pink-slime journalism is a practice in which news outlets, or fake partisan operations masquerading as such, publish (often but not always) lower-quality news reports that appear to be independent local news outlets. The use of these websites to gather user data has also been observed. The reports are either computer-generated or written by poorly-paid outsourced writers, sometimes using pen names.

It would have been easy to see the Cathedral City address and worry that the RN&R was involved in one the above acts of malarkey. We’re not.

The RN&R’s owner and publisher, Jimmy Boegle, is a native Renoite who primarily lives in the Palm Springs area, where he also runs the Coachella Valley Independent, our sister paper; he purchased the RN&R in 2022, and now resides in Reno part-time. (Here’s that story, if you missed it back then.) He handles all things business, and our physical office, like many good things, was lost to a COVID-era financial crunch, so it makes sense for most of the mail to go to him.

I’m based in Reno, where I manage (yes, from home) most things editorial, including our team of freelance reporters and commentators, almost all of whom are longtime local experts in what’s happening in Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Gardnerville, Minden and the Lake Tahoe area.

In any case, my point is this: I’m glad you asked, new reader! We are living knee-deep in an era where commenters like to shoot first and aim later. (The examples are, of course, so plentiful that it’s nowhere near necessary to give you an example, but I can’t help but think of the one, from a different reader who respond to our mailing address in 2024 with: “Go back to fucking California where you belong and fall off into the Pacific Ocean.”) 

I appreciated the chance to clear up a possible misconception. If there are others brewing out there—as in, if you’ve ever wondered, “Why, RN&R? Why the heck did you do it that way?” feel free to ask. You can find me at krisv@renonr.com.

If you ever need to mail something to me or one of our local freelancers, by the way, we have a Reno address, too: Reno News & Review, 550 W Plumb Lane, #B-260, Reno NV 89509.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor