A complication has arisen in Robert Allbritton’s plans to rebrand his NOTUS project as The Star. The move, scheduled to take place next week, is aimed at giving Washington a robust second (albeit digital-only) daily newspaper to compete with Jeff Bezos’ diminished Washington Post.
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Why The Star instead of The Washington Star, the long-shuttered paper that his father had once owned? Adam Piore reported for the Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday that Allbritton doesn’t own “The Washington Star” trademark:
The name of this latest Allbritton venture is a slight misdirection, however: the trademark is owned by Dovid Efune, the owner of the New York Sun. Besides, Allbritton said, replicating the original would be too “backward looking.”
But now it appears that Efune has his own plans. Emma Uber, writing in City Cast DC, tells us that Allbritton was more interested in naming his project The Washington Star than he’d let on, even negotiating unsuccessfully with Efune for the rights. Efune, in turn, plans to launch his own Washington Star later this year — and that he’s suing to stop Allbritton from calling NOTUS “The Star.” In a statement to City Cast DC, Allbritton responded:
Six weeks after NOTUS announced that it was rebranding to The Star, a newly formed entity associated with Dovid Efune has sued NOTUS for trademark infringement. The entity does not and cannot own the word “Star,” which has been used by and associated with dozens of media publications for over 100 years. The entity itself only even claims to have recently adopted “The Washington Star,” decades after numerous other “Star” publications have been using “Star” marks.
Efune is the publisher of The New York Sun, a conservative outlet that has quite a bit of national news on its site. In other words, it wouldn’t take that much for him to run a couple of DC stories and slap a “Washington Star” logo on a second site. He’s already publishing a version of The Washington Star on Substack. Efune told Katie Robertson of The New York Times:
We’re reviving one of the great and epic rivalries of American journalism. 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.
Efune added that he’s aiming for a newsroom of about 50 journalists — about half of what Allbritton is planning for The Star, or whatever it ends up being called.