An old-fashioned newspaper war is brewing in the nation’s capital.
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.
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.
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,” Mr. 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 outlets, and their promise of new jobs, are arriving at a tough time for the media industry, when many publications are laying off staff and trying to adjust their businesses for plummeting search traffic and a race to notch up paid subscribers. The Washington Post laid off more than 300 of its 800 journalists in February after losing more than $100 million a year, retreating from much of its metro and sports coverage.
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 Mr. 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. Mr. Efune said that he was interviewing candidates for multiple roles and planned to hire up to 50 full-time journalists and contributors.
Mr. Efune, a former top editor of the Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner, has some experience with reinvigorating old papers. For the past few years, he has focused on The New York Sun, a defunct broadsheet that shut down in 2008. The outlet now publishes online and has a weekly print edition, and it counts two million subscribers, “tens of thousands of which are paid,” according to a Thursday memo from Mr. Efune that said the paper was profitable.
The Washington Star will publish under the oversight of The Sun’s newsroom until an editor in chief is named. It will be ideologically aligned but distinct, according to a Thursday memo from Mr. Efune to the paper’s staff.
In an editorial, Mr. Efune wrote that The Washington Star’s remake had been “some years in the making” and that his priority was to “stay true to the editorial legacy of the Star,” which he described as supporting “limited government” and opposing “bureaucratic corruption and federal overreach.”
The Washington Star will face an equally determined competitor in Robert Allbritton, who is underwriting The Star. Mr. Allbritton is the billionaire co-founder of Politico. His father, Joe Allbritton, owned The Washington Star from 1975 to 1978.
The junior Mr. Allbritton founded the nonprofit Allbritton Journalism Institute in 2023, intending to train up young journalists. The institute publishes NOTUS, which currently covers political news.
Tim Grieve, the editor in chief of NOTUS, told The New York Times last month that NOTUS would relaunch as The Star in the first week of June and had plans to more than double its newsroom to 95 journalists by the end of the year. NOTUS has recently hired a number of prominent Post reporters and plans to aggressively expand its coverage in Washington.
Mr. Allbritton said in an interview that he welcomed the competition from The Washington Star and was not worried that readers might confuse it with The Star.
“The Washington Star has been gone for 50 years now, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that they’re bringing it back,” he said.
Mr. Efune, who was recently a bidder for The Daily Telegraph in Britain, said the launch of Mr. Allbritton’s The Star did not deter him and instead “accelerated our timeline to scale up.”
“We see tremendous value in the brand equity of The Star and, importantly, the brand identity and editorial legacy of the great American newspapers,” he said.
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: [email protected]
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