Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Adversaries unite

Friday, June 24, 2005 | 4:18 a.m.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

WEEKEND EDITION

June 25-26, 2006

Editor's note: Jerry Fink, the Sun's entertainment writer, wrote the following piece for his Showroom column last Friday. It expresses how I feel so well -- better than I could have done -- that I thought it should run instead as today's Where I Stand.

-- Brian Greenspun

Every few years I have to remind readers that I'm not Jerry Fink.

I realized the time had arrived once again when I read in the Letters to the Editor column of the Las Vegas Review-Journal last Sunday a missive bemoaning the recent announcement that in September the Sun will be delivered inside the R-J.

The letter was signed "Jerry Fink."

I received several calls from people wondering if I had lost my mind, or if I was simply begging to be fired.

Neither is the case.

The letter writer is my alter ego -- a 70-year-old, outspoken, ultra-conservative, archenemy of anything smacking of liberalism.

He and I bear the same name, but that's about the only thing we have in common.

I am Jerry Fink, but I'm not that Jerry Fink.

"The more than 1.5 million residents of Clark County have spoken loudly with their pocketbooks in opting not to subscribe to or purchase that phony newspaper," Fink wrote.

In supporting his myopic vision of the world, he has disregarded the fact that afternoon papers have all but disappeared in every city in the country -- it has nothing to do with their quality, only with the fact that they are printed at a time that most readers find inconvenient.

If one wants to argue that the lack of readership and the quality of the publication are synonymous, then one has to wonder why the R-J's circulation is only 165,000.

That's a rather anemic number when you consider the population of the area is about 1.7 million. The paper I last worked for, the Tulsa World, had approximately the same circulation and it had one-quarter of the population of Vegas.

If it were a better paper, would the R-J have a greater circulation? Are these enormous numbers of non-subscribers speaking loudly with their pocketbooks against the morning paper? Or is the R-J a victim of the same trend as the Sun -- a declining readership?

Fink wrote that a newspaper is merely a product and if the public doesn't want it then it "should disappear from the shelves like 'new' Coke."

That's scary.

If a can of Coke disappears, it doesn't undermine democracy.

The closing, merging and homogenization of the media, however, does.

It's sad that there are so many otherwise intelligent people in this world with closed minds, people whose rabid belief in their own philosophies have caused them to adopt the position that if you don't agree with them then you are an enemy -- and that as an enemy it's no great loss if you are silenced.

In fact, the loss of a newspaper is tremendous, and the R-J and Sun should be commended for coming up with a reasonable solution to the troubling trends that affect both of them.

The Sun and the R-J are not enemies, merely adversaries.

The real enemies are those who would celebrate the death of either.