Vegas Media Shuffle: Wynn, Caesars & The R-J

The trouble with not trafficking in rumors is that when you get them right but you don't have official confirmation, you can often miss the boat. For instance, listeners of The Strip heard me mention as far back as early in the summer that Harrah's was going to finish its Caesars name switcheroo, long before anyone else in the press had it. But I didn't commit it to blog or print because I never could get the clear confirmation from sources over there. Then it happened.

Well, it happened again this week. On Tuesday, I learned that Michael Weaver, Caesars Entertainment's vice president for marketing, is leaving. Then I heard he would be following his old boss, Marilyn Winn Spiegel, who in November became Wynn Las Vegas president and promptly persuaded Steve Wynn to shut down the beloved Alex.

But if Weaver were heading to Wynn, where would that leave Jennifer Dunne, vice president for public relations and advertising? On Wednesday, I texted her, and we had this exchange:

Friess: Hey...Are you leaving Wynn?
Dunne: Where did that come from? Good lordy!!!
Friess: Well, Michael Weaver is leaving Harrah's and I'm hearing he's following Marilyn to Wynn. But he and you do similar things, so...
Dunne: I hear he is a great guy! Do you know him?
Friess: Yes. He's a very good egg. Interesting you haven't actually answered either question.
Dunne: You are so funny! I would look forward to working with him if he is coming to Wynn. :-)

Huh. Well, about a half-hour ago, Dunne sent out this email:

Wanted you to hear directly from me... I have resigned from my position
with Wynn Resorts, effective today. I do not have any firm plans but
intend to take some time off and visit family and friends. I will be in
touch once I settle in somewhere. I have really enjoyed working with you
on this exciting Wynn experience and look forward to crossing paths on
the next adventure!

This is really a toughie for me. Weaver and Dunne are two of the most consummate professionals I've dealt with as a Vegas journalist. After my initial surprise at Dunne's announcement, it dawned on me maybe she didn't know this earlier in the week. Of course, there's no official confirmation that Weaver's going to Wynn, but it does seem likely.

(UPDATE: Dunne tells me she left Wynn of her own volition and made the decision, which had been percolating in her mind, after our text exchange. Also, she confirmed Weaver starts at Wynn on Monday in a new VP position created for him.)

Also today we learned that Jacqueline Peterson, a top corporate spokeswoman for Caesars, also is leaving the company. So perhaps Jacqueline is taking Dunne's gig? Time will tell. Wynn's publicist in charge of food and beverage, Katie Conway, also left last month. She followed her husband, a chef who had gotten a big job in L.A. So there are openings.

This all may seem like inside baseball, except that it is interesting that there's this shift of executives from Caesars Entertainment to Wynn and what that could mean for how the company is actually managed on a day-to-day basis locally. Moving from the Pascal/Poster/Breitling/Dunne world to a Winn/Weaver world is a distinctive change. Weaver's biggest contribution to Caesars Entertainment was as the innovator who went aggressively after such niche markets as gays and Hispanics. I'm not sure Wynncore needs much help with the gays.

The big question is, does all of this imply Steve Wynn is emotionally detaching from Wynncore Vegas to the point that he just wants very highly skilled people who will maximize profits? If so, it's fair to ask at what cost to the property and its image this may come.

* * *

While I'm on the media kick for this Friday, I ought to take note that Michael Hiesiger, the longtime business editor of the Review-Journal, was let go yesterday. No immediate replacement has been named, but it's interesting because this is the first big staffing change under the new regime of publisher Bob Brown and new editor Mike Hengel.

It's also surprising because if I had to pick a department in need of an overhaul at the R-J, the business section isn't one that would instantly spring to mind. I'd make a beeline, as loyal readers know, to the online division, which is an inane operation run by clueless people as frequently noted here, and then to a features section desperate for new life and purpose.

The business coverage is fine and often exemplary, as is the local news division. The only way these sections could be made substantially better would be to hire more reporters, but the editors of each do pretty well with the small set of overworked scribes they're allotted.

One theory: Has the new publisher, formerly the advertising director, been getting earfuls from advertisers about how they're covered? That might explain why Hiesiger's the first head to roll. Other department heads are understandably nervous, but I just can't make a whole lot of sense of why Brown and Hengel would take aim at this area first if they're taking a full inventory of their strengths and weaknesses.

Meanwhile, I'm also hearing that Review-Journal subscriptions have surged in the past three months since Sherman Frederick and Thomas Mitchell were ousted from their publisher-editor jobs. I had heard they're up 8,000, and I asked Bob Brown about that in an email before the Hiesiger thing came to onto my radar. Brown wrote back:

Circulation is up, not 8,000. You'll have to wait for the March 11 audit report from ABC.

Honestly, any circulation increase is impressive in these tough times for print media. I am, indeed, looking forward to those new numbers.

Why Wynn Really Closed Alex

Oh, dear.

I just got through listening to Steve Wynn on a conference call with gaming analysts and shareholders regarding earnings, which were robust thanks, of course, to China. I'll get back to that in a moment.

First, though, some breaking news. It's Marilyn's fault. Asked about how new Wynn Las Vegas president Marilyn Winn Spiegel was fitting in, he sang her praises and offered this example:

I remember one conversation I had with Marilyn was about six weeks after she came. She came to my office and said, "You know, Steve, we have tremendous success with nightclubs and our very popular, hip restaurants. I think our steakhouse, SW, is the most successful restaurant in Nevada." She said, "The public taste has changed. We have a five-star restaurant, a Michelin-star restaurant, a five-diamond restaurant in Alex. People don't want to sit for three hours and eat dinner that way anymore. I'd rather repurpose that restaurant. I know that you love the idea that one of the restaurants has all those Michelin stars, and we've got three of them in the building. This one in particular, this gourmet kind of restaurant, I'm not sure we can't use that space more effectively in another way." And frankly I would have never questioned that restaurant on my own. Marilyn made me question that restaurant and she was right. It's a simple example of that was something she brought to my office that I would have missed. There's been more of that sort of thing.

So there it is. Yes, John Curtas, Alex was sacrificed on the altar of the nightclub set. By my calculation, Marilyn would have come to Wynn with this idea in late December and Alex was shut down not a month later. Spiegel came to Wynn from being a regional president for Harrah's. She's intimately involved with what's become of the Rio as well as Caesars Palace since the company took it over. I shudder to think of what she might have done with Bellagio's Conservatory had she been in charge back in the day. What a waste of non-money-making space! I fear Wynn is losing touch with his own philosophy that not everything needs to make money in order to add something intangible to the overall package that is his resorts.

If I were Paul Bartolotta, by the way, I'd be hugging ol' Marilyn even closer right about now. Seriously.

Meanwhile, the earnings call was fascinating, too, for how disturbingly, uh, solicitous Steve Wynn is towards the Chinese government. He said the Macanese authorities are very involved in the design of his resorts there by telling him what they'd like to see. You think even they buy that?

And then, a bit later, he said this:

About six weeks ago, Mr. Wen Jiabao (the Chinese premier, left) came to Macau and he said he hoped that the prosperity that was being enjoyed by the resort industry in Macau was being shared by the workforce. That was followed immediately by public comments by the (Macanese) chief executive. When our company hears those kinds of comments, we don't wait for a week or a month, we respond instantly and we increased the line employees ... by 6 percent. We were the first to do that not because we wanted to be first but because we respond directly to leadership given to us by the government. that's an important part of our strategy, of our identity in that community. Our job is to constantly refresh the notion that we are humble, proud and grateful to be allowed to be part of that scene and the way to do that in China is to take good care of your employees.

Why if I didn't know better, I'd think Mr. Wynn got ahold of the talking points of the Democratic caucus in the Nevada Legislature or the Culinary 226! Can you even imagine if Brian Sandoval or Barack Obama weighed in on what he might do with his profits? It gives me a headache, imagining it.

I know he's saying this stuff for the benefit of the Chinese media. But it is still very peculiar to American ears, especially knowing his list of grievances with the Obama Administration and others. He's bowing to Chinese demands because the nation can confiscate his business overnight if it so chooses. That's all.

Wynn, Wynn and More Wynn

I've been a quiet little blogger the past few days, but what better way to get back into the action than to take note of the fact that there's just been an explosion of Wynn-related fodder in the past week. Some of it and some thoughts on it:

* Steve Wynn, Eponymous. I've got a piece up on Portfolio.Com today that is another entry in their series on business people whose name is their brand.

* Steve Wynn, Vegan. John Katsilometes flexes his outstanding writing muscle and observatory skills in his Las Vegas Weekly cover on Mr. Wynn's newfound vegan zealotry. Given how many of the interviews with Wynn that I've aired involve him eating something, John's opening passage is particularly ingenious. I'd feel jealous of Kats for this scoop except that he was precisely the right reporter to do it, having spent the summer being vegan himself. Also, for the second consecutive week, the Weekly's cover was nothing short of brilliant. On a related note, Robin Leach had a follow-up scoop in getting Wynn to say he's changing his will to emphasize his animal-rights interests.

* Steve Wynn, Action Hero. There's a riveting video interview with Wynn with Prannoy Roy from the Indian TV station, NDTV. It's weird because the interviewer is a thorough suck-up who doesn't challenge a thing and is given to such pronouncements as "You singlehandedly changed Las Vegas!" But the exchange turns from banal to absolutely fascinating when Wynn gives the gritty details about his experience when his daughter, Kevyn, was kidnapped in 1993. That stuff starts at about 24:30 if you want to skip Wynn try to sell himself to the Indian government for potential casino opportunities as well as his now-standard anti-Obama dissertation. He goes on for about 15 minutes, and it is classic Steve Wynn storytelling at his best, most emotional.

* Steve Wynn, Harrah's Poacher. Of the oddest bit of news that has emerged from the Wynn world lately, it's that Elaine Wynn's nephew, Wynn Las Vegas president Andrew Pascal, is leaving the company. Odder still is that he's being replaced by Marilyn Winn Spiegel, longtime Harrah's executive most recently regional president of three Vegas properties. Both pieces of these developments are peculiar. Pascal had seemed likely to become Wynn's heir; could it be that the Wynn divorce is, in fact, creating awkwardness between her family and him? Or maybe he's gotten a signal that he won't be the heir apparent and wants to make a name for himself in some other way? The filing indicated that Pascal had no conflicts or disputes about the company's approach or mangement, so what gives then?

Meanwhile, though, with all those folks in house looking for a chance to shine -- Tim Poster, remember him? -- Wynn hires away a veteran of the company that does things exactly the opposite of how he does them. It would be like Prada hiring the head of J.C. Penney's, no?

Seriously, I have never in my entire history of talking to Steve Wynn ever heard him say a complimentary thing about the modern Harrah's operation. And on last week's earnings conference call he even went out of his way to dis Harrah's chief Gary Loveman over the all-too-familiar design to your left. Here's the passage:

And I was walking out of the Borgata [in Atlantic City], which I want to look at and there next-door was Harrah's, with a curved tower and asymmetrical roof, a very poor, homely copy of the Wynn Las Vegas. And I called up Gary Loveman, and I said, "Hey man, have you no shame?" I mean, and in the building was in the wrong proportion. In order to do what we do with our building, it has to be horizontal in its proportion or doesn't look right. And this one was verticals, which just looked like sort of a tall rectangle with point on one end. And he said, he gave me an answer, he said, "Well, duplication is a serious form of flattery." I found that relatively unsatisfactory answer. I think maybe someone should try to do their own thing instead of doing bad copies of other people's things. But we do give the boys a chance to louse up what they think we're doing.

Ouch. I realize Winn Spiegel had nothing to do with that design, but it's also not as though she has been running Caesars Palace, which is the closest thing Harrah's has to a Wynn. Huh.

Oh, there's also some news on Wynn and the whole drama with his dealers and tip-sharing. For some reason, this story has never really intrigued me that much, but if you care, check out Liz Benston's account.