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There is a great disturbance in the Force. Have you felt it?
Newspaper people certainly have. Especially people who work for newspapers that might be for sale — which is a lot of them — and newspaper folks who toil in what we like to call the opinion shops.
The biggest ripples are emanating from Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Review-Journal, largest news organization in Nevada, was sold to new owners a couple of weeks ago.
There's a lot of that going around, what with the new digital universe having thoroughly upsot the legacy outfits. But this one was particularly odd.
At first, the identity of the new owners was kept a secret, not only from the paper's readers but even from nearly everybody who worked there. Which, of course, led to widespread speculation as to who it might be and, particularly, why they might want to remain anonymous.
Usually, when new owners take over a newspaper — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, Red Sox owner John Henry acquiring The Boston Globe — they are eager to tell everyone. There's an admirable urge to humble brag about how they see their public responsibility to maintain a key community institution, along with a little self-pep talk about how they can find the key to profitability.
Those who thought the Vegas buyer might be Sheldon Adelson, casino tycoon and big-time donor to Republican candidates, were soon proven to be correct. Along the way, Review-Journal articles about the change of ownership were altered and/or withdrawn by top management, the new bosses went all Charles Foster Kane with a front-page editorial promising wise and even-handed stewardship and the top editor found out by having someone else read him an article from his own paper that he'd accepted a buy-out he hadn't been eligible for the day before.
The concern in Vegas now is that the Adelson clan will meddle, both in news coverage and editorial positions, to boost their own interests and undermine their political and business rivals.
Slanting news coverage like that would violate every ethical standard of American journalism, and if the Adelsons go too far at the Review-Journal, they will find that they've fatally devalued their own investment.
If they care, that is. A money-losing newspaper might well be tolerated by an owner as a loss-leader if it can boost the owners' other ventures and concerns.
That's the downside of finding a billionaire benefactor to buy a struggling publication. Potential conflicts abound. How will The Washington Post cover Bezos' many business ventures, and their rivals? If Warren Buffett would buy, say, The Salt Lake Tribune, would it matter that he also owns Rocky Mountain Power?
Newspaper publishers, though, do have the absolute right to dictate the stance of their editorial pages. (See Salt Lake Tribune endorses George W. Bush, 2004)
Except, going forward, in Fairbanks, Alaska.
The Fairbanks News-Miner was also sold recently, by Dean Singleton, former owner/publisher of newspapers that included The Salt Lake Tribune, to a newly formed nonprofit and not-at-all secret community foundation created by the family that owned the newspaper before Singleton.
The nonprofit model of newspaper ownership, also found at Florida's Poynter Institute and Tampa Bay Times, can be another dream of we ink-stained wretches. No need to make a profit, less pressure to do things that put money ahead of good journalism.
Except that, in order for the public contributions to a newspaper-owning nonprofit to be tax-exempt, the newspaper cannot advocate for political candidates. That means no editorial endorsements.
Which is ironic, as the practice of endorsing candidates was restored to the Tribune at Singleton's direction when he took over management in 2002. It had been abandoned here decades ago, they tell me, as then-Publisher John W. Gallivan's personal penance for having endorsed Richard Nixon.
As a longtime editorial writer, I've always felt that candidate endorsements were not only valid but essential if your editorial voice is going to mean anything at all. They are the only editorials aimed at asking all of your voting-age readership, not just elected officials, to do something. The ones that focus all the other positions that have been taken and give them some hope of actually being put into action.
But, hey, if ending endorsements is the price of a newspaper's otherwise independent survival, most of us could live with it.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, has been a loss-leader for newspapers in Kansas, New York and Utah for 38 years. gpyle@sltrib.com