Media war brewing in D.C., reports NY Times
An old-fashioned “newspaper war” is brewing in the nation’s capital, reports The New York Times.
The Washington Star, a newspaper that stopped printing more than 40 years ago, has started publishing again under the ownership of Dovid Efune, a media executive and publisher of The New York Sun, states The Times.
It comes just weeks after the politics site NOTUS announced it would rebrand as The Star and expand its mission to cover local news and sports in Washington.
According to the report in The Times, “the two closely named rivals plan to take on a much more established competitor: The Washington Post, which is owned by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and recently cut its staff by a third.”
“We’re reviving one of the great and epic rivalries of American journalism,” Efune said in an interview. “For decades, The Star was The Washington Post’s fiercest competitor and an important editorial and ideological counterweight in the press in our nation’s capital.”
The rivalry has already reached the courts as, states The Times, “Efune filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against NOTUS for its planned use of the Star moniker.
“The Washington Star was a conservative-leaning afternoon newspaper that published for 128 years until it went into bankruptcy and shut down in 1981. The Post snapped up The Washington Star’s former headquarters and printing presses in the bankruptcy sale.”
The new Washington Star has started publishing on Substack, and Efune said that he intended to have a custom website live within the next two months and offer a weekend print newspaper by the end of the year.
