There’s room for only one Star in this town.
That’s according to a federal judge, who on Tuesday ordered the political news website NOTUS to suspend its planned rebrand as The Star, after the owner of a rival publication, The Washington Star, filed for a temporary restraining order in a trademark dispute.
Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. said the order would “prevent the public from being confused” between the two publications while the legal case continued.
Both news outlets are trying to break into the Washington media market in the wake of The Washington Post’s laying off more than 300 journalists and scaling back its coverage this year.
In one corner is NOTUS, a nonprofit political news website started in 2023 by Robert Allbritton, a co-founder of Politico. NOTUS was planning to change its name in early June as part of an expansion into local news and sports coverage in Washington.
In the other corner is The Washington Star, a revival of an old, conservative-leaning newspaper.
Dovid Efune, the publisher of The New York Sun, acquired the trademark for The Washington Star in 2024 and started publishing under the name on Substack last week, with plans for a custom website and hiring underway for a team of journalists.
At the same time, he sued NOTUS in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for trademark infringement, arguing that readers had already started to confuse the two publications.
Lawyers for NOTUS said in court documents that hundreds of media organizations had used “Star” as a moniker for more than a century.
In addition to reader confusion, Judge Alston noted that both outlets targeted the same geographical area with similar coverage.
He ordered that NOTUS be temporarily barred from rebranding as The Star, The Washington Star or similar, and that it could not launch its new domain name. But he stopped short of requiring the publication to take down any current references used online. The next hearing in the case is set for July 22.
“This ruling reinforces our focus on what matters most: reviving a legendary American institution and returning a much needed voice in our nation’s capital,” Mr. Efune said in a statement.
A representative for NOTUS did not immediately comment.
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: [email protected]
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