Like Charles Bukowski’s ill-fated little children, newspapers have been dying in the trees in this new millennium. Perhaps you’ll be lucky and an apparently journalism-friendly plutocrat minted in Gilded Age 2.0 will plunk down some change for your favorite newspaper, as Jeff Bezos did with the Washington Post, or maybe Sam Zell acquires Tribune Media and all manner of mishegoss ensues. Those are the uneven outcomes of the Digital Era, in which you need to pray for the right billionaire to come to your rescue.

When Sheldon Adelson recently ponied up the cash for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, anonymously at first, the second scenario seemed most likely to materialize. It still does. The right-wing casino owner and subject of a criminal probe was purchasing power, hoping to silence reporting that ran counter to his financial interests and political agenda. Accusations and resignations in the newsroom have become commonplace, though Adelson has attempted to quell dissent by pumping cash into the beleaguered property, which it desperately needs. The news business has always been a Faustian bargain, even during the flush years, but the end-of-days reality for broadsheets and tabloids has often brought with it a whole different degree of compromise.

From Sydney Ember’s excellent New York Times piece about the growing credibility gap inside the embattled publication:

With newspapers struggling to survive, it is not uncommon for wealthy businesspeople to step in and buy them — Jeff Bezos with The Washington Post, for instance, and John Henry with The Boston Globe. Each case presents potential conflicts in covering the owner’s businesses, as well as concerns that the owner might attempt to influence coverage.

The problem is particularly acute for The Review-Journal. Mr. Adelson, the chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, is a casino magnate, a powerful Republican donor, a patron of education and a fierce defender of Israel, and his myriad interests present an almost singular example of how aggressive journalism can collide with the pursuits of a paper’s owner.

That new dynamic has roiled the ranks of the newsroom, creating a divide between top editors who see it as part of their job to review coverage of Mr. Adelson, and staff members who chafe at what they perceive as inappropriate interference. In the nearly six months since Mr. Adelson purchased the paper, at least a dozen journalists have quit, been fired or made plans to leave soon; many cite a strained work environment and untenable oversight, in particular regarding the coverage of a bitter legal dispute related to Sands’s operations in Macau.

There are advantages to having a billionaire as an owner, staff members agree. The newspaper has hired reporters and a graphic artist, and is upgrading its videography and photography equipment. Some employees, including Ms. Robison, have been given pay raises. A broken sewer pipe under the building has been fixed. Recently, the paper bought drones to use for news coverage.•