Saturday, July 1, 2000 | 2:37 a.m.
Fifty years ago when Hank Greenspun founded the Las Vegas Sun a lot of people had predictions about the paper's future.
Starting a paper almost from scratch, going up against an established daily, assembling a staff, meeting the payroll, paying for the building, press, paper and ink... It was touch and go.
It's a safe bet no one back then predicted that the Sun at the turn of the century would be at the center of a multimedia dynasty.
Not even Hank Greenspun, whose vision and ambition may have been exceeded only by his resolve to reach his dreams, could have foreseen the magnitude of the coming evolution.
Perhaps a skilled futurist could have foretold of the Sun spawning sister publications such as Las Vegas Life magazine and Las Vegas Weekly newspaper. But who then could have known about the Internet? And cable TV?
It's equally impossible for those of us today to predict what the next 50 years of technology will bring for the Sun and the Greenspun family's other media holdings.
But there is at least one constant that will continue to flourish a half-century from now, according to Danny Greenspun, Hank's son and vice president of the Sun.
"We'll be here," he said. "The Sun will be here."
Media Group
A more specific prediction that Greenspun feels reasonably comfortable making about the Sun's high-tech future concerns a pooling of resources with the Greenspun Media Group's stable of publications.
Greenspun Media Group includes the magazines Las Vegas Life, ShowBiz Weekly and VegasGolfer and the weekly newspapers Las Vegas Weekly and In Business Las Vegas. The Greenspun Media Group also publishes the Ralston Report, a political and business newsletter by Jon Ralston, and Ralston's daily e-mail service, "Flash."
The Greenspun family also owns the Sun and the Internet site Vegas.com.
Danny Greenspun, president of Greenspun Media, envisions a greater degree of interfacing -- to borrow high-tech lingo -- among the publications, allowing them to share common information.
The linking together of the publications' operations through the Internet and wireless technology would diminish the need for each one to generate its own listings for upcoming shows, sporting events and other entertainment, for example.
The network also would enable the creation of online links from a story in one publication to stories in the others on the same subject. If readers enjoyed a business story in the Sun about skydiving companies, for example, they would be able to link to a related story in Las Vegas Life in which the author describes parachuting out of a plane at 10,000 feet.
Sun stays unique
The Sun's news content will remain unique from the other publications, Greenspun said, but the overall reduction in duplicated tasks will allow the daily paper to devote more resources to canvassing the city.
"You'll have more people covering the news instead of trying to put together the smaller things," he said.
Bryan Allison, director of content for Vegas.com, added that in the coming decades the notion of a once-a-day newspaper will be but the dimmest of memories.
"On the Internet, you'll have constant updates of the Sun that will allow you to compete 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "The news cycle for newspapers will be nonstop."
The emergence of newspapers online also will inspire changes in the way people read the paper. Both Allison and Greenspun think a generation or two from now that most -- perhaps all -- of the Sun's readers will scan the paper not in printed form but on flat-display computer screens. High-resolution technology will make reading papers online as soothing to the eyes as perusing the printed word, they said.
The process of news gathering will continue evolving as well. Allison predicts that in time it will be commonplace for newspaper reporters to write stories, shoot video and photos for TV and the Internet, and provide commentary for TV news programs.
Las Vegas ONE
On the subject of television, the cable news channel Las Vegas ONE is a joint venture of the Sun, KLAS Channel 8 and Cox Communications. As the technology race hurtles onward, the ability of the Sun to both instantly air stories on Las Vegas ONE and post updates on Vegas.com will enable the paper to continue competing blow-for-blow with every other kind of media outlet in the Las Vegas Valley.
The topic of competition is an important one because of the Joint Operating Agreement between the 40,000-circulation Sun and the larger Las Vegas Review-Journal. The JOA, as it is commonly known, consolidates the business functions of the papers while each maintains its own news staff.
The JOA leaves control of circulation, production and advertising in the hands of the Review-Journal. But by embracing new technology and niche publications, the Greenspun family has beefed up its arsenal to capitalize on the next 50 years of the information age.
"While it's true the JOA has artificially held down our circulation, in a sense that's freed us from justifying and defending our circulation," Greenspun said.
"It's allowed us to pursue new and innovative ways to get information out -- Las Vegas ONE, Vegas.com, the business weekly, Las Vegas Weekly. If not for the JOA, we might not have gone into these other areas because we would have been in competition with ourselves."
Perhaps that branching out is where the past and the future meet. Hank Greenspun in 1950 bought The Free Press, a struggling thrice-weekly launched by striking workers from the Review-Journal. He re-christened the paper the Las Vegas Morning Sun and began publishing daily.
Four years later Greenspun and a group of buyers purchased KLAS, the first TV station in Southern Nevada. He would later buy out his partners before selling the station to Howard Hughes in 1969.
Then, in 1980, Greenspun's company, Community Cable Television, began operations. He later renamed the business Prime Cable, which was sold to Cox Communications in 1998.
Since his death in 1989, the seeds of media diversity Greenspun planted have been nurtured by his wife, Barbara, publisher of the Sun, and her sons, Brian and Danny. The dreams Hank Greenspun envisioned have been exceeded, and his paper now finds itself poised on the cutting edge of technology's future.
And if the use of paper in producing newspapers goes the way of typewriters, that's fine by Danny Greenspun.
"I miss the sound of typewriters, but the new technology is good news for trees," he said. "They need a break."
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