The Stars may not be aligned for D.C. media mogul Robert Allbritton.
Last month, Allbritton’s political news site NOTUS announced it would expand its coverage and rebrand as The Star. Many figured the name was an homage to his family’s former ownership of The Washington Star – a paper that stopped printing in 1981. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Allbritton said replicating the full name of the paper would be too "backward looking.”
It may not have been quite so simple. According to a lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday, the name wasn’t Allbritton’s to use. According to the suit, NOTUS twice engaged in talks with The Washington Star Company to purchase the trademark, but were unable to reach an agreement. They went with a galaxy-inspired name anyway, just dropping the “Washington.”
Now, days before the planned relaunch, that decision is proving complicated.
It turns out TheWashington Star was actually planning its own launch, led by Dovid Efune, the publisher of the conservative New York Sun. TheWashington Star began posting articles on Substack this month, ending a 45-year publishing drought weeks after NOTUS announced its expansion. Efune told the New YorkTimes he’ll launch a full-fledged site, under the New York Sun’s newsroom, soon. According to the lawsuit, having another company with Star in the name is bad for business.
The lawsuit claims the two newspaper names are confusingly similar and, since media executive Dovid Efune holds the trademark, a judge should order NOTUS to stop using the name and pay damages for infringing on The Washington Star’s business.
In an editorial published Thursday, Efune wrote that The Washington Star’s relaunch had been “some years in the making.” Federal trademark records show that Efune has held the trademark since 2023. Interestingly, records show the trademark was filed by Robert Garson, one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers, who represented Trump in an unsuccessful $50 million lawsuit against ex-Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.
In a statement to City Cast DC on Thursday, Allbritton said NOTUS plans to "vigorously defend against the claims.”
“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 statement read. “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.”
Lawyers for Efune are pointing to Allbritton’s family history with The Washington Star as another reason D.C. readers may be confused about the distinction between the two publications. Allbritton’s father, Joseph Allbritton, owned the newspaper from 1975 to 1978. The paper folded a few years later, going bankrupt after 128 years as a conservative-leaning newspaper. The Post purchased its newspaper plant, printing presses and delivery trucks after the closure, but stopped short of acquiring the paper itself. (City Cast DC is owned by Graham Holdings, formerly the Washington Post Company.)
The younger Allbritton, meanwhile, stayed in the media business, founding Politico, which ultimately sold to a German media firm for more than $1 billion — giving him the money to bankroll this new venture.
In an interview with the Times, Efune said he intended to launch TheWashington Star website within the next two months and print a weekend newspaper by the end of the year. The Washington Star will publish under the oversight of right-leaning New York Sun until an editor in chief is named, and in his editorial Efune wrote that the publication will support “limited government” and oppose “bureaucratic corruption and federal overreach.” He hasn’t said anything about covering local Washington, and the New York Sun does not focus extensively on metro news in its city.
For the record, City Cast DC will not be rebranding as City Star DC.
