We're halfway through our big L.A. trip for the X Games -- I assume by now you've seen the footage of the guy who fell off his skateboard from 40 feet up and didn't die, no? -- and I figured I'd put up a quick post pointing out a couple of my pieces that came out today. (I'm on Wi-Fi in my room at the Quality Inn in Carson, Calif. I'd say it's "free" except that they force every guest to pay $2.25 a day as a "wi-fi maintenance fee" whether you use it or not. They also charge $1.75 a day for the in-room safe whether, again, you us it or not. Quite a scam, methinks, except that I'd pay $9.99 a day for wi-fi, and have done many times, so...)
Anyhow, my New York Times piece on Las Vegas security following the NY-NY shooting and Luxor bombing is found here. And my Newsweek Q-and-A with Billy Bob Thornton is here.
Of course, podcast listeners got to hear my interviews with Bill Young, Justin Lampert and Billy Bob Thornton before these stories appeared.
As most journalists do, I like to look at the blogs to see who has picked up and/or commented on my stories. The Vegas security piece got blogged quite a bit and I'm particularly proud of this comment from a Vegas-based blog called Shortwoman:
Reading the article, I could not decide whether the NYT was saying “eek beware stay away” or “hey, they have things under control.”
Wow. Could that be because we journalists don't actually have such agendas, contrary to popular misconception and the insistence of bloggers and other partisans to make simplistic sense of everything? I just wanted to look at the issue and give an airing to the various sides. That's our job, and more often than not that's how it's done. Really.
3 comments:
VegasRex has an interesting post about your article in the NYT.
http://www.vegasrex.com/2007/08/03/are-you-scared-yet/
Looks like you were out of town for another casino shooting.
Here's something funny: Google News has collected 72 stories on the shooting under the headline: "Gunman opens fire in Las Vegas casino Caesars Palace, wounds 2"
The fifth link under the above hed is for the NY Times, but not to a story about the latest shooting. It links to a story that ran on 8/2 asking how safe is Vegas!!
I wonder if they linked to that story by mistake, or because they have a finely tuned sense of irony, or because they really, really like you.
http://www.google.com/news?q=casino
The above URL will fetch different stories as the news changes, so it may not show what I described if you are viewing it after Saturday night 8/4.
I actually did notice that the piece was ranking high and I think it's just a matter of coincidence - Google News uses some formula that pushes up well-read news stories on the Internet, and a piece about Vegas and casino shootings from the Times is bound to rank up there. Then people click on the story thinking it's about the latest thing and that just boosts it. Or some such.
And yes, genius timing. Altho the fact that we've now had two casino shootings and a car bomb on weekends I've been away is creeping me out...Am I what stands between Vegas and disaster?
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