Plaza Partners Up With Gay Basher For Theater!

No, really.

The supposedly resurgent Plaza just announced a deal with the Insurgo Theater "Movement" to have the local troupe present its frequently terrible productions in a new 75-seat space on the hotel-resort's third floor. Insurgo is expected to open with "Waiting For Godot" when the place officially re-debuts on Sept. 1. (David McKee broke the news before the press release via CityLife, by the way.)

You might recall the Insurgo from my LVW column last fall. They're the ones whose owner, John Beane, wrote this on a public Facebook site to openly gay Review-Journal theater critic Anthony Del Valle:

“you’re a piece of shit, man. i can take a bad review any day and i definitely have shit nights as an actor. but youre just such a fucking piece of spam about it all. you cant just write the review. youve got to demean, you’ve got to insult the company and the effort of doing it at all. the union redemption offering at the end was just faggoty pissy bullshit. it was womanly. seriously. fuck you.”

Mr. Beane would later respond that he did not call Del Valle a faggot and offer up a link to Tim Gunn in an "It Gets Better" video to show how he really, truly empathizes with the Plight of The Gays. He never apologized or even acknowledged that his use of these slurs was ill-advised.

And now the Plaza is his partner. How exciting for them!

A Very Good Vegas Media Shuffle

A couple of really fascinating job changes are in the works out there in Vegas medialand, both of which make a ton of sense and promise to improve the overall outlook.

First, Steve Sebelius has left Las Vegas CityLife to be a political columnist for the Review-Journal. This is a good thing because punditry and analysis are what Sebelius does best. It also adds a bona fide liberal voice to the R-J's opinion pages, something that's been missing there since Erin Neff bolted in a post-election huff in 2008.

Being a rigorous editor demanding his reporters do great work was not Steve's best skill. There are numerous examples of cover stories in CityLife in recent years that were poorly sourced, overlooked important elements and provided precious little of the sort of insight for which we turn to weeklies. I often got the impression Sebelius was much too busy pursuing a TV career and working on his own blog and column, and I was never quite clear how the editor of a print publication could also be an "investigative reporter" (as opposed to pundit) for a TV news outfit. Which loyalty is served? If Sebelius had some news to break, it would seem he owed it to his main gig to do it there, not in a competing medium. Would he allow his own staff reporters to break stories elsewhere? You'd think not. But this problem is now resolved; he's a pundit for the R-J and a journalist/analyst for KLAS. Go forth and prosper.

Meanwhile, the wonderfully talented Scott Dickensheets, who gave me my column at the Las Vegas Weekly as editor there, has done something pretty unusual these days: He's leaving Greenspun Media for a gig with the R-J's parent Stephens Media as ... the new editor of Las Vegas CityLife! This is terrific news for the publication, which now will get a truly experienced journalist and gifted writer at its helm and -- God willing -- perhaps a sense of humor, too. Scott's got such a vast and impressive career as a magazine writer and editor; those reporters better get ready to start defending their sourcing and story angles better once he arrives. My sense is two of the most prominent staffers -- Amy Kingsley and Jason Whited -- have raw talent but could use some mentoring from someone like Scott.

I wish I could say I'm disappointed to be losing Scott as the Las Vegas Sun's metro columnist, but I'm not. I'm not really sure why, but I just never got the sense he got into the rhythm of it during his brief tenure. When I think of the great metro columnists in this city -- OK, there's just one, the R-J's John L. Smith -- I think of a mix of great writing and truly original reporting on topics that are often overlooked. I never had the sense of discovery I expected from Scott's columns, and I kept waiting for that to kick in. Maybe he just didn't enjoy it as much as he thought he would.

Anyhow, these are good changes. Everyone gets to do what they're especially good at and, I suspect, that they most enjoy. That's a win-win for them and the community.

The Show is UP: Blooperpalooza!

In honor of our fifth anniversary as podcasters, Miles and I drew back the curtains so those who don't listen live can hear the nutty stuff that goes on before I edit this thing. Enjoy. Click on the date below to listen or right-click to download and listen at your leisure or subscribe via iTunes or Zune.

Aug. 22: Our FIFTH Anniversary Blooperpalooza!
SPECIAL REISSUE: The 2008 Blooper Show

Fights! Celeb Outtakes! Singing! It’s been FIVE years! Five years of brilliant, revealing interviews, witty banter and… oh, who are we kidding? It’s been five years of fuckups, stumbles, confusion, arguments and a whole lot of fucking cursewords. But most of that is behind the scenes except for once a year when Steve edits together the best outtakes and we revel in how badly we do this job. If you’re in the chat room weekly, you’ve heard most of this, but if not, this is your shot. Some of this is new, though, including outtakes with Jon Voight, Steve Wynn, Englebert Humperdinck, Daniel Negreanu and others. We’re blowing out show this week – no tourist tip, no interviews – so sit back, relax and enjoy the circus.

In banter: Madonna for $1 billion, veganism at Wynn and hula hoops on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me."

Links:

Robin Leach writes of Madonna’s possible $1 billion Caesars deal, and Norm Clarke explains why it doesn't add up
Veganism, it’s what’s for dinner at Wynn Resorts
Al Mancini of CityLife provided a full list of Wynn eatery vegan dishes
Steve’s AOL News piece on the Hula Hoop ban
The full, very funny 6-minute Vegas segment from “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me”
Our last blooper show, in 2008

More on the CityLife-Sun Drama

The prior post drew a response from CityLife publisher Geoff Schumacher. It actually sparked another line of thought that I had overlooked to begin with. So, first, here's part of Geoff's response, which is in the comments of the other item:

Amy wrote a story about Greenspun Media Group, which recently earned national acclaim when it won a Pulitzer Prize, brought in a nationally recognized web authority, then promptly fell apart, laying off workers, losing other key players and closing various publications. It was not a story about the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which did not win a Pulitzer, did not hire a nationally recognized web authority and did not fall apart. I'm not clear on why you think this story should have been something other than what it was.

I'm sure a fine story could be written about the Review-Journal, and perhaps it will be by CityLife or some other news organization. But the news peg for this particular story was crystal clear and needn't have been something other than what it was.


So here's the thing. Kingsley's piece makes many assumptions about why Greenspun Media Group hit its rocky shoal, all of them focusing on journalism. Schumacher does the same. What Kingsley overlooked and Schumacher forgets is that the Sun has never been a profitable publication, not when Hank Greenspun started it and probably not for the vast majority of its life including recent years. And definitely not when they won their Pulitzer.

The Las Vegas Sun and most of the GMG publications have been propped up for all this time by the Greenspun family fortune. It is only because THAT has faltered that suddenly economic realities have hit them. Sure, 702.tv was an abject failure and yes, there are disgruntled people, but the Greenspuns are heavily invested in THREE businesses that have fallen apart right when Curley & Co were trying to make their big splash: Real estate (American Pacific), gaming (Station Casinos) and media (Tribune Co as well as GMG publications).

GMG won its Pulitzer because the Greenspuns were willing to ignore the fact that their media operations bled like Roy after a tiger bite. But Kingsley's piece suggests that all of their problems came because of bad journalistic decisions or, at least, doesn't present the whole picture of this company, its fiscal history and other explanations for its problems.

Fact is, it was largely a function of economic forces and all sorts of bad decisions far away from their newsrooms. The proof is found in how many people they retained and hired when they went from being a full-service newspaper to an eight-page insert that really, on its best days, was only 5.5 pages of original copy. That didn't make economic sense, but they kept on keeping on. The balance sheets had to have looked about as bad then as now.

Thus, if you're only going to judge GMG by their layoffs and the parts they've closed down, you need a yardstick. Is Curley the total failure you make him out to be? I'd need to know the web traffic -- AND HOW IT COMPARES TO ITS COMPETITION FOR CONTEXT -- to be able to say. If the Sun is drawing numbers even close to the R-J's, and I've heard they are despite the discredited sources Sherman Frederick uses to claim his traffic in public, then the effort hasn't been a failure in any other way than that it was unable to make money in the worst economy this city has ever seen.

Furthermore, if you're going to have experts talking about how newspapers misunderstand the challenges of doing video work, how do you not at least in passing acknowledge that this is a problem at both major publications?

Bottom line: If the economy hadn't turned so sour, the Greenspuns would've continued to shovel money into the operations. They always have. In that respect, this piece overlooks an enormous part of the story.

CityLife Drills Into Greenspun Media

So here's the problem with having both alternative weeklies owned by one of the two major media conglomerates in Las Vegas: They can't do serious, in-depth coverage of media issues without messy conflicts of interest of their own.

Amy Kingsley of Las Vegas CityLife tries this week with a lengthy piece on Greenspun Media Group, its supposedly unrewarded risks in the New Media space for the Las Vegas Sun and conflict on Corporate Circle between imported, high-priced Web guru Rob Curley and the traditional news staff. It is a good read and adds some intriguing detail to the decisions that led to the decimation of the staff that I chronicled and catalogued in December.

Kingsley is a terrific reporter -- I've personally complimented CityLife Editor Steve Sebelius for that hire in the past -- and she puts in a noble effort. But she fails because she didn't give the whole picture and she probably couldn't because, well, the whole picture could include some unflattering things about the company that pays her wages, Stephens Media. I mean, look at what's advertised directly above her story on the Web:


Awkward!

You can read the piece here and I do recommend it. One thing that accurately comes across is the blinding arrogance of Rob Curley, the Web wunderkind who took credit for revolutionizing the Internet operations of Newsweek, the Washington Post and a paper in Lawrence, Kansas. I was a cheerleader for him when he arrived but after an initial, pretty redesign, such little things like an effective search engine on LasVegasWeekly.Com and other issues made me wonder if he cared about the little things that make a site user-friendly.

Kingsley convincingly makes the case that his past successes may have been short-lived and the result of circumstances of timing and opportunity, not vision. Plus, Curley comes across as churlish with a quote like: "The only thing I love more than journalism is capitalism." From the looks of the expensive embarrassment that was 702.tv, he's failed in Vegas on both fronts.

[Aside: Curley re-tweeted today the Poynter Institute's pick-up of Kingsley's piece, which is strange given how badly he comes off in it.]

All that said, to really get where GMG is these days, you need to put it in the context of its total media ecosystem. That's an ecosystem that includes one of the most dysfunctional news websites in the nation, ReviewJournal.Com, and a main newspaper, the R-J, that has somehow lost circulation during the era of one of the biggest population growth spurts in U.S. history. If we're ready to call Curley a failure in Vegas, then first we need to know the web traffic of both papers' websites, which Kingsley does not provide. Somehow I bet if it looked good for the R-J, she would've had no trouble getting it and comparing it to the Sun.

She also has a passage in there about the Sun's failed web video efforts but doesn't bother to mention that the R-J hired ex-weatherman Nate Tannenbaum to do a laughable and technologically ridiculous daily newscast. I don't know how many plays it's getting on the LVRJ.Com site, but today's episode has been on YouTube for 21 hours and has enjoyed 4 hits. FOUR. Two of which were me looking for a good moment to shoot this screencap:


If you click on it, you'll see that the episode from two days ago has a whopping 27 plays. And here's the entire history of RJTV on YouTube:


You know what has had more hits than a month's worth of RJTV episodes? This:




One more thing. The illustrations that went with Kingsley's story were very weird. This, for instance, was for Curley:

Beyond the fact that he looks like a prison inmate, what's with the scribble in the lower right part? It looks like he's got duck's wings or something. I'm seriously wondering if artist Brian Taylor thought he was drawing Chris Cooper instead. See?

Anywho, the point is that news organizations cover one another at their credibility's own peril. Without attempting to put GMG's issues in context against the R-J's, they've left out a huge chunk of the story. Which, happily, is why we have blogs.

[DISCLAIMERS: I was a staff writer for the R-J from 1996-99 and have freelanced for the R-J, CityLife and the Weekly, where I have had a column for about two years. Also, I wrote this week's cover story for the Weekly, which means Kingsley and I were head-to-head as cover writers this go-round.]

Cuz lawmakers don't have real problems to address?

My colleague Steve Sebelius, editor of Las Vegas CityLife, is really excited today over something the Legislature is working on. I want to believe he's kidding, but he seems to be sincerely elated over Assembly Bill 257.

What, you ask, does AB257 do? Does it resolve the state's massive budget crisis? No! Does it address such rampant social challenges as teen pregnancy, mental illness, unemployment, workplace safety, school overcrowding, homeless children or gambling addiction? No, no, no, no, no, no and no! Does it make it so that Miles and I can be legally obligated to nag at one another for the rest of our earthly days? No again!

AB257 -- and I'm not making this up much as I wish I were -- makes it a misdemeanor to take more than 10 copies of a free publication if the intent is "(1) profit by recycling the newspaper; (2) sell or barter the newspaper; (3) deprive others of the opportunity to read the newspaper; or (4) harm a business competitor." It's a thought crime based on a California law! The punishment could be a $250 fine.

We at the crack staff of VegasHappensHere.Com have yet to investigate how much revenue the Golden State is pulling down from such stupidity, but I'll bet Mr. Sebelius a steak dinner it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.00.

This is a joke, you think. Me, too, but no, there are 13 got-nothing-better-to-do Assembly members co-sponsoring this bill, which is probably called the Pussy Legislators Sucking Up To The Alternative Press Act. (I have to make an airport run in a few minutes or I'd come up with a clever acronym.) One who isn't co-sponsoring it, I'm proud to say, is my own rep, Mark Manendo. No, Manendo is too busy trying to pass a law requiring grass, not desert landscaping, at veterans' cemeteries. We're all so proud.

So tell me, geniuses and Mr. Sebelius, are cops going to be on hand to count out the number of copies someone has taken and write tickets? And does it apply to the porn stuff pictured here?

Because, really, I want my police busy doing something so idiotic. Or will someone fixed on take lots of something allegedly "free" stop themselves by thinking, "Aww, shit, some moron in Carson City actually passed a law against this and I could be out 250 clams if I do this. Maybe I'll go take fistfuls of straws from Jack in the Crack instead."

Oh! Oh! Oh! Also, this proposed law NOW only applies to "free" publications, but it's a slippery slope! You know, like letting Miles and me marry will lead to men trying to marry their beloved flat-screen TVs and women wedding Manolos and 10-year-olds of both gender marrying Jonas Brothers posters and there goes the culture! After they ban taking 10+ copies of the Jewish Reporter or Q Vegas, will they start legislating how many of those candies I can have at my dry cleaner? Or how about napkins at Arby's? Or how long I can sit on that sofa at RC Willey?

OMG. This IS brilliant! There are whole new revenue streams just waiting to be tapped! Woo hoo! Budget deficit solved!

Or maybe we can put a sign on the boxes that says, "Please only take one." Then maybe our esteemed lawmakers can get back to dealing with actual problems.

Somebody dislikes Encore

Well, I'm sure more than one person does. But since I had yet to read anything in the media that was seriously critical of Encore Las Vegas and its design, I thought I'd post the link to Tony Illia's Las Vegas CityLife critique in which he states that Encore lacks "restraint."

A few excerpts:

Wynn, always the pitchman, believes it's his greatest achievement yet. "Intimacy and richness is the difference with Encore," says Tom Breitling, the former Golden Nugget owner-turned-Wynn employee. "It's really like a boutique hotel." But nothing about the 653-foot-tall, 2,034 room mega-resort seems small or boutique-like. ...

...There is an island bar that somewhat resembles a circus merry-go-round, with four TVs and six gaming tables. There are also daybeds, lounge chairs and a sunglass-cleaning service....

...The main casino is drenched in bordello red,...

...The building is a type of large brown package, nay, present, waiting to be opened. But one architect called it a UPS truck turned on its side....

...The attention to detail is stunning, albeit excessive....

...Encore is trying too hard to impress. Every square inch is adorned with a texture, pattern or contour. There are no blank spots that simply let you breathe and experience the space. The composition is overwrought, too tightly packaged together. It can be suffocating. Encore is a sensory overload. Wynn's need to dazzle and overwhelm guests doesn't always pay off. ...

And, to be fair, he closes with this trying-to-end-on-an-up-note bit:

That said, Encore improves upon Wynn Las Vegas in many ways. The main entryway off Las Vegas Boulevard is much better. Guests pass through the front doors into an uplifting double-height space with diffuse daylight, trees and flowers. Casino corridors have natural light, which is a bold but pleasant surprise; sunlight has long been an industry taboo. The floor-level backwall is also entirely glass, allowing sunlight inside, blurring the line between indoors and out. The retail promenade, meanwhile, is wider and more leisurely than Wynn Las Vegas, which seems cramped at times. And the rooms are splendid. The mood is more relaxed, less kinetic. Glass-encased showers, deep tubs, floor-to-ceiling windows, and plasma TVs in both the bed and bathrooms encourage a pampered, lazy attitude. Rooms have couches, ottomans, writing tables and wireless Internet access as well as fine art prints and safes.

Contrast this to the glowing reviews by UNLV's Dave Schwartz in the Business Press and the Christopher Reynolds of the L.A. Times, the paper whose architectural critic once said the Wynn Las Vegas' theme was "midrise office tower in Houston, circa 1983."

I'm not saying Illia's wrong or that his opinions are invalid. I'm just posting this because they're almost the only critical thing I've seen written about the new resort.

Show's UP: A Very Wynning Xmas

Merry Xmas and Happy Hannukah everyone! Hear the show by clicking on the date or right-click to download it and listen whenever you want. Or subscribe via iTunes here or via Zune here.

Dec. 25: Wynn's Encore, Part I

This is Steve Wynn’s week, no doubt about it. On what is traditionally one of the slowest nights in Las Vegas and in the middle of the worst recession in generations, he opened the doors to his $2.3 billion expansion, Encore. The results were a flood of curious explorers that led to bumper to bumper traffic on the Strip as far south as the Mandalay Bay and a line all the way into the Wynn casino. In honor of that milestone, over the next two weeks we’re presenting our interview earlier this month with Wynn in which he talks about everything from the shape of the buildings to the original plans for the Encore TV commercial.

In Banter: Encore, snow, Criss Angel, City Center, Elton John.

Show links:

See Encore here
See pix of the snow in Vegas here
Read CityLife's cover of Criss Angel here
See the breaking news about Elton John here
See the L.A. Times' glowing review of Encore Las Vegas here
See the video for Richard Cheese's"Christmas in Las Vegas" here
See Steve's coverage of the Treasure Island sale here
See the Vdara sign photo here

This week's LVW col: 18 is Enough

Here's this week's column! Time to cook up my T-Day storm! Enjoy and happy holiday!

18 is Enough
Opposing a lowered gambling age shows a hypocrisy in Sin City

By STEVE FRIESS

For a split second, if that, a few folks in Nevada mulled an idea proffered in a somewhat offhanded way by an attorney for a slot-machine manufacturer at a gloomy little state-of-the-industry conference. It was an idea so outlandish, so outrageous, so devious and ridiculous and dangerous that within one news cycle even the guy who dared to utter it said he was just asking a darned question and, geez, he wasn’t serious.

What horrifying thought could generate such outraged unanimity among a wide range of political bedfellows—Gov. Jim Gibbons and CityLife editor Steve Sebelius agreeing on something?!?—and such embarrassment that the notion could even be uttered?

I’ll tell you. The guy sorta, kinda wondered if maybe a state suffering a budget shortfall that could prompt the termination of school librarians and a halt to cancer treatments at public hospitals would consider expanding the pool of potential gamblers by—oh God, will this laptop keyboard spontaneously combust if I even type such shameful, forbidden words?—lowering the legal age for casino play to 18.

To which I ask: Uh, why not?

Read the rest HERE