HuffPo Thinks AOL-Bashing Is HILARIOUS!

Remember when AOL spent $315 million to "acquire" the Huffington Post and then allowed Arianna Huffington to wring as much of the AOLness out of the enterprise as humanly possible?

Well, that image above is kind of a fascinating postscript. It's a HuffPo article by Dean Praetorius collecting what he called the "some of the better reactions from across Twitter (the social network that landed the Congressman in hot water to begin with), including some more comical responses." He refers to Rep. Anthony Weiner's bizarro press conference yesterday, of course.

Now, Praetorious' efforts clearly didn't reach much beyond his own Twitter feed, as the 14 "better" and "more comical" responses he selected are entirely made up of tweets from prominent media sources. They include such brilliant, insightful zingers as these:


So he didn't try very hard or feel like looking, even, through the #weinergate hashtag for actually funny or clever remarks.

But what's more telling is the one Praetorius evidently found the funniest and made sure would be displayed first for readers. It's this:


Yeah, I'm a little defensive because I, too, still use AOL email. And, yeah, I'm mildly irritated whenever I run into any email problem that I reference here or on Twitter or our podcasts and hear from the world how uncool and passe that is. You know, as if Gmail never goes down, right? I guess I've never understood why one email system is better or worse than another or how somebody's preference confers upon the user any credibility as a tech-savvy human. I've had 11 different real addresses and seven different phone numbers since I created my AOL account in 1994; it seemed to me that keeping just one means of being contacted that doesn't change is a sensible way of being reachable.

Oh! One more thing! Rand Getlin, the clever fellow who tweeted that? He's not really one to talk. He's a reporter, after all, for that au courant search engine, Yahoo!

Trump En Route To Vegas As GLBT Ire Heightens

Last week, I reported for AOL News/HuffPo about growing anger at mogul Donald Trump on account of his recent spate of polarizing political statements. Among other things, he reversed his 2000 position favoring "a very strong domestic-partnership law" by telling the Des Moines newspaper he now opposes any legal recognition for same-sex couples.

Trump, fresh off of getting Obama to release his birth certificate today, is enjoying all the attention even as he fails to see how deftly the White House is using him to paint the entire GOP as nutcases. And he probably figures that all his blather in the past has only enhanced his prominence, so whatever!

The difference: Other politicians who take controversial stands on social issues can do so with less peril because their business is politics. Trump's business, however, is hospitality, and these remarks can and will resound when people choose a hotel. Today, my latest Las Vegas Weekly column examines that as well as why other proudly Republican CEOs in Vegas -- Murren, Wynn and Adelson, specifically -- don't get tarred for their politics in the same way.

But wait, there's more!

Today I'm learning of new fallout for the Trump Las Vegas. In addition to GLAAD listing all Trump properties as places for people to avoid and the IGLTA taking up the question of whether to boot Trump properties at their May board meeting, now the Human Rights Campaign, the federal GLBT lobby organization, is instructing its local members to refuse or return donations or gifts from Trump properties.

James Healey, the HRC Las Vegas guru, said today they have turned down an item offered for auction by Trump Las Vegas for HRC's big dinner fundraiser on May 7 at Aria. Healey explained via email the item was declined Monday after Healey checked with his Washington D.C. contacts who suggested they do so.

Healey told me via email: "This is a national policy that the local community [may] choose to support." He chose to.

Meanwhile, Las Vegas' GLBT activist community is jumping in, too. The Stonewall Democrats, a group of gay activists who managed somehow to get Sen. John Ensign, R-HisZipper, to support the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, put out a statement urging "those who believe in equal rights for all U.S. citizens [to] avoid the Trump 'Brand' in all of its various permutations. This would include his television shows and hotel properties amongst other ventures bearing the Trump name."

Stonewall chairman Derek Washington went on:

At some point, people like Trump have to learn that we LGBT Americans will no longer be used as cannon fodder to be sacrificed to the political ambitions of those who use bigotry to garner votes. We have money, and that money can be spent where it is appreciated. Caesars, Wynn and MGM are all places where our LGBT dollars are welcome and our business is encouraged. We have options.

Just to be clear, I am not endorsing this boycott. I am observing it. I've never personally believed boycotts are effective for either side of the political debate. But I do know that when a company gets tarnished as intolerant, it is extremely difficult to overcome or reverse. And in Las Vegas, where there are so many choices at so many price-points, that can absolutely make a already-flailing enterprise flail even more.

What will be interesting is if the Trump corporation finds itself having to publicly distance itself from the blabbermouth himself in order to reduce the long-term fallout. There's precedent for that; Coors did it in 2004 when Pete Coors ran for U.S. Senate in Colorado.

Oh, by the way, guess who's addressing a set of women's Republican groups at the Treasure Island on the Strip tomorrow night?

The New Dino Chronicles of Vegas

I'm not a big dinosaur guy, but yesterday's assignment for the Agence France-Presse to cover the attempted sale of the third-most-intact Tyrannosaurus Rex at a big natural artifacts auction put on by Bonhams & Butterfields at the Venetian was a surprisingly great deal of fun. The T. Rex, a female awkwardly named Samson, garnered a top bid of $3.6 million, but that wasn't enough so they didn't sell it.

Maybe it was the fact that it was my first assignment outing with my new iPhone since I've figured out the whole Twitter-Picture thing and so it was fun to show folks in real time via my Twitter feed images like this one of the cute kid vamping in front of the largest shark jaw ever found:

That didn't sell, by the way. The highest bid came in at around $550,000, but auctioneers decided that didn't hit the reserve price. There was a lot of that yesterday, reflecting that even millions-of-years-old fossils aren't immune to 2009's economic doldrums.

I met some colorful people. You think of expensive auction bidders as stuffy folks in suits or pantsuits probably representing some mysterious billionaire, but this guy...

...was just a rock musician named Damon Ranger of the Chicago-based band Blackbox who was considering buying something (but didn't) for the house in the $10k-$15k range.

This shlubby-looking fellow, however...

...is on the hook for about $1 million in total winning bids on a variety of items including the pair of tricertop-related dinosaurs behind him. He's Dr. Larry Lawson, 44, an oncologist from Big Lake, Alaska, quite near now-famous Wasilla. He claimed he's got a 501(c)3 non-profit called From The Vault that covers his collection of all sorts of dino-stuff because he opens it up to school groups, but he's got no website for it and I wasn't able to locate any such organization anywhere in the U.S., let alone Alaska, in the IRS's online database. Odd, that. At least this seems to confirm he's an oncologist.

Oh, and there was at least one mysterious billionaire, but he showed up in person with his wife:

That is, of course, Sheldon Adelson and wife Miriam in the front row with the appropriately numbered paddle No. 770 went on to buy about $142,000 worth of stuff, including blowing $67,000 on this:


It's a large opalescent ammonite from the late cretaceous period found in southern Alberta, Canada. They lived 71 million years ago and that color is natural. (Photo credit: Dolce Dreams blog).

Adelson was quite friendly. In fact, his wife initially gave me a no-comment, but as we chatted some more Sheldon actually said, "It's OK, he's been good to us." Which is funny because some on his PR team don't feel so warm about me. The couple explained they would put some of the items in their home -- "we bought some tchotchkes for the house" -- and for the Adelson high school they fund.

He seemed to be in terrific spirits, actually, and walking a lot better than the last time I saw him in person in January 2008. I noted to him that his stock is back up a bit -- it was below $2 in March but closed Friday at $16.13 -- to which he replied, "It's only beginning to rise again." He expressed pleasure in the upswing they're seeing in Macau and referenced his coming Hong Kong IPO.

With the T. Rex unsold and available for about $5 million, I wondered why Adelson didn't buy it. He had seen first-hand how popular an exhibit it was when it drew 15,000 to view the free auction preview in the Guggenheim space. My Las Vegas Weekly editor, Ken Miller, had fantasized about Samson staying in Vegas in this week's issue, in fact, and while I don't think Ken's idea of standing it next to the Welcome sign is feasible, I sure do think that someone should take note of the immense popularity not just of the preview but also of Sue, the most intact T. Rex ever found, which has drawn mobs for going on 10 years at Chicago's Field Museum.

I quizzed Adelson on why he didn't buy it and he said, bafflingly, "It's huge, where would I put something that big?" Seeing how we were just a doorway from the immense Venetian's Grand Hall, I thought of a few places. Seemed to me that he could easily draw a million people to pay $5 each to see the thing somewhere at the Venetian or Palazzo to cover the cost of buying it. He's a billionaire, though, and I'm not, so I stifled myself.

I do find it strange that I was the only reporter to cover the Adelson angle here. The Las Vegas Sun didn't, the L.A. Times didn't and the Associated Press didn't mainly because they oddly covered the auction fron Reno owing to the fact that the Vegas bureau no longer has staff on the weekends. (The R-J ran the AP story which means the largest local paper ceded a significant scientific and economic event to the wires only to end up with something written from 450 miles away.)

It's not as though Adelson was difficult to spot...

...or that he's that obscure a personality or business figure. He may have fallen from the lofty heights of 3rd richest American, but he's still the 26th wealthiest American and first richest Las Vegan, according to the latest Forbes list.

Yet my favorite was the Huffington Post, which long has boasted the most consistently banal, obvious, cliched coverage of Vegas of any major site on the Web. Here's a screenshot of their little preview of the auction:


The text there reads: "Only in Vegas would they... auction off dinosaur bones?"

Well, no. There have been dinosaur bone and fossil auctions all over the world since man started finding the things. But someone thought this counts as clever writing.

R-J Uses AP for Ensign Day 3?

I've laid off on the local media criticism in this space for a while in part because I've learned what it's like to have some half-cocked nutjob misread and distort every little thing that happens and/or that you do. But I did have to make a quick note that the Review-Journal, on only the third day of the John Ensign sex scandal, used the Associated Press' report on its front page and had no staff-generated material on the drama other than a 360-word commentary by columnist John L. Smith.

That is really strange, especially when the Las Vegas Sun obtained the letter sent by Doug Hampton, the cuckolded husband of Ensign's ex-mistress, to Fox News dated several days before Ensign's public revelation of his affair. It's not just that the Sun beat the R-J on this one -- ya win some, ya lose some -- but that the R-J had nothing at all to report today?

I'm also at a loss to understand why Hampton, who explained in the letter that he was sending it to Fox because he didn't want his claims investigated and exploited by what he perceived to a left-wing publication, wouldn't also offer it and the rest of his story to the R-J. The Sun is viewed as a left-wing publication by many; the R-J is viewed as the Vegas print equal to Fox News Channel.

On that front, a Fox News spokesperson tells The Huffington Post that they did not tip off Ensign's camp to the Hampton letter and hadn't gotten to the point of verifying the claim when Ensign broke the news of the affair himself on Tuesday. OK, I'll buy that, especially since my own partner, himself a TV news exec, suggested exactly that scenario this morning when we saw the Sun report.

But that does not explain, however, why Fox News did not reveal the existence of the letter for days AFTER Ensign admitted the affair. How is it Fox didn't post it that day or at least the next day? As most of the media and political worlds were grappling with why Ensign would come out with this at this stage, nearly a year after the affair had ended, how did Fox NOT see themselves as in possession of a major piece of the "why-now" puzzle?

R-J, Meet The Woodshed

Talk about being dragged kicking and screaming into the new millenium! This weekend's Review-Journals offered up several examples of what sort of neanderthal dimwits are running the Bonanza Road asylum.

First, there was this very weird column by my good pal Norm, who deserves huge raves and plaudits for his fascinating, lengthy piece about the wayward drug-dealing cowboy who fled the MGM Grand fire in 1980 by climbing down a rope. That was terrific. Read it.

His Friday column, however, was an inadvertent scream. It appears he was forced into promoting the big "get" of the R-J's Internet, uh, empire, a folksy weatherman named Nate Tannenbaum who has a hard time keeping his on-air job in the local market.

Wroth Norm: "It's the vision of Review-Journal publisher Sherman Frederick, who wants to tap the full potential of the Internet."

That's a joke, right? Sherm and "vision" in the same sentence? You're funning us, yeah?

But, no. Frederick is quite proud of his dream for the R-J site which is to put Nate Tannenbaum on everybody's smart phones rehashing, no doubt, that day's newspaper or something.

Let's review here. The Sun's version of investing in its online properties includes poaching industry visionaries from the Washington Post and Newsweek. The R-J's idea is hiring the castoffs of the local TV business and behaving as though his move into the online space is career innovation rather than career desperation. "This is a whole new world for me," Tannenbaum told Norm.

Why? I mean, why him? The Internet's not new. There are lots of smart people in Vegas and elsewhere with years of experience doing that which Sherm has recently developed "visions." Why turn to someone who thinks it's all one great big ol' wacky adventure? Tannenbaum appeals to a much older demo than the folks who would want an R-J newscast on their smart phones. Channel 8, sadly, just shed several excellent people with actual journalistic credentials beyond predicting the weather in a city where the weather never even changes.

Why? Oh, I know! What's it that Tweetie Bird sings? Cheep, cheep, cheep. And through it all, Sherm Frederick fancies himself as a genius. Hooray for Sherm!

But as silly as this roll out and staffing choice may be, it's still a good idea to expand the video presence, so I hope they succeed with it. Somehow, though, I get the sense that Sherm's underling, Editor Thomas Mitchell, doesn't. He used his Sunday column, for instance, urinated all over the whole newfangled Webby thingie.

I didn't think there were big-city newspaper editors this contemptuous of New Media anymore. Here's how this gem starts:

I, along with several other Review-Journal scriveners, recently joined the lowing herds browsing the ether -- otherwise known as bloggers, those free-range creatures who mostly chew up the intellectual property of others and spit out their cuds online.

You can find our blogs at the newspaper's Web site, reviewjournal.com, along with some actual news.

Yikes, huh? Mitchell seems not to notice that his opinion pages have been filled for decades by people who feed off the reporting work of others and put their interpretations on it. So it's OK for a select few people he personally sanctions to do so, but that's it! Everyone else is a thoughtless, ill-tempered hack.

Even if that was all there was to blogging, he's ignored the fact that blogging can be thought-provoking and informative, can give a far longer and robust life to the very articles he publishes, can do what newspapers once held to be their credo, provide voice for the voiceless. Mitchell much prefers those voices to go through him, which is to say he prefers to give voice almost exclusively in Las Vegas to reactionary wingnuts whose views are so extreme, inflexible and venom-laden that they're irrelevant to sensible debate and... HOLY CRAP! Mitchell was an early adapter to the types sometimes found online, if not the medium itself! Mea culpa!

What's more, bloggers -- including some at the R-J -- break news all the time. I've done so repeatedly in this space and on the blogs of The New York Times and others when I'm so employed to do so. Even better, I find it far more likely that a print news reporter will fail to provide proper credit for the origin of my work than a fellow blogger and that a print editorial writer won't offer up any source material at all to support his/her arguments.

Mitchell also intones, before chewing on the intellectual property of George Orwell and spitting out a worthless cud: "For all of you who write blogs, which seems like everyone, and for all of you who read blogs, which seems like no one..."



That's interesting because Blogger and Wordpress, which power thousands of blogs, are the 12th and 21st most-visited sites in America, according to Alexa.com. The New York Times chimes in at 23rd as the top site for a print news publication. The Huffington Post, the first blog to appear on the list, is 97th. Somebody's reading them.

But what's more jarring is the overall purpose of the column: "Hey! We're blogging! We're now in the cesspool! Like you! Come visit us!"

I've got to go create some intellectual property that I relish the prospect of others chewing upon, but just one more little thing. This, from the print edition...



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