Media Muddle: Sad Shermy Righthaven Edition!

For reasons nobody can explain, the disgraced former publisher of Nevada's largest newspaper continues to write columns and to blog for the R-J, the newspaper whose circulation and reputation he trashed and that faces years of litigation ahead on account of how he and his minions botched their efforts to protect their copyrights.

Still, that he continues to have a voice is worthwhile for delicious moments like this. Today, he wrote about some cheating scandal eight states away that he believes indicts public school education.

This is fun stuff. Sad Shermy, he of the creative but self-sabotaged copyright-enforcing jihad, reprinted three long paragraphs of his Sunday column's source material, an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in providing the background of the cheating scandal. Didn't Righthaven, aka the R-J, sue others for that? Why yes, they did!

Sad Shermy may argue Fair Use, except that he's not commenting on the quality of the piece or the writing as, say, I just do down below. He could have just as easily, were he not lazy as hell, paraphrased the facts of the case himself. He found it more convenient to rip off another writer's reporting and work. What's more, check this out:


That's a screenshot from his column online. What's missing above? Oh! That's right! A link to the original report. You know, something almost every Righthaven defendant did provide.

But wait, there's more! On the R-J's site right now under this very piece, a commenter has left this:


See that? Righthaven, aka the Review-Journal, has also sued websites for allowing commenters to post lengthy passages of R-J stories. Here the R-J allowed "Jack Webb" to post 228 words of a 539-word blog item by Alex Pareene of Salon.Com with no commentary, nothing to reflect fair use. And remember, there are editors at the ReviewJournal.com who approve or reject comments. They have made a legal case that website purveyors are responsible for everything, including the copyright violations committed by their readers.

Where, oh where, is Steve Gibson of Righthaven when he's needed? Oh, that's right. Preparing for depositions about whether he and Sad Shermy misled the courts about who owns the rights to the material Righthaven sued over. Natch.

* * *

On a vaguely related but terrifically entertaining note, that same column was Shermy's chance to cackle over the education system today. And yet, try to spot the not-so-tiny mistake:


Remember, folks, this is a piece about education. Someone -- probably not Sad Shermy! -- corrected that rather egregious misspelling online, which is why the dead-tree version still has its merits. Web readers must have left comments mocking the error, but editors chose not to approve them on account of that it makes Sherm Frederick look foolish and undercuts his moral authority as an expert on the results of that old-school education system he graduated from back in the '50s or whenever. If this hadn't been in print, I'm quite sure Sad Shermy would deny he had made such a fundamental spelling error in the first place.

But here's the best part. Look way up at the first screenshot there. Oh, OK, look at it here:


I doublechecked and, yes, in print Sad Shermy also spelled "principal" correctly in the portion where he cut-and-pasted passages to save himself the bother of paraphrasing the very premise of his column. In other words, he didn't even re-read what he put in his own piece or he at least would have noticed his own spelling error or, worse, ignorantly changed it in the AJC version. He just hit CTL-V and then went on from there, bloviating and doing what his good friend, ex-RJ editor Thomas Mitchell, once called "chew[ing] up the intellectual property of others and spit[ting] out their cuds."

Media Muddle: KNPR, Bornfeld, Electric Daisy Cartoons

It's Sunday and I've got tons of writing to do, which means that I'll set it aside as usual to muse. Loads and loads of stuff:

* We expect our media critics to be forthright. But on Thursday, when Steve Bornfeld of the Review-Journal announced the end of his Mediaology column, which analyzed the local TV news universe, he did so with this bizarre and ridiculous statement:

[T]he issues [this column] addresses are finite. Believing they're infinite would result in increasingly strident, repetitive columns. Readers and TV pros deserve better.

Uh, what? He's run out of news? Can you imagine if Norm Clarke said, "You know, every original celebrity scandal that's ever happened has happened, so I don't want to bore you all anymore. Bye!" Or if Jon Ralston said, "These elections are so frigging repetitive. Someone wins, someone loses, people get mean, people lie. How boring. I'm done!" Or maybe Howard Stutz might perk up one day and say, "The earnings go up, the earnings go down, they keep having these poker tournaments, so what, we've got the gaming thing fully covered. Let's move on, shall we?"

The TV news business is a perpetual news machine of its own. The personalities, decisions and circumstances -- especially in a rapidly changing era of media -- present endless stories, reasons to opine, worthwhile topics to delve into and important matters to continue to explain to readers/viewers about how and why the news as it is. Every time a major story breaks, someone independent ought to assess how it was managed by the medium that still provides the most information to the most numbers of people. There is so much wrong with local TV news it makes my head explode, and Bornfeld barely scratched the surface. Yet after just three years, Bornfeld can't come up with anything more to say? What?

Nope, not buying it. Something else is happening here. Maybe he's personally just tired of doing it, which is fine but don't pretend like the entire pursuit is no longer worthy or valuable. Maybe the newspaper decided the space could be better used for more advice columns and puzzles, which we'll find out soon enough. Maybe, having fired staffer Corey Levitan, the Features Section decided they needed Bornfeld to pick up slack elsewhere, and the one thing that needed to go before he snapped was this. But to say, "Hey, we did it all! Nothing left to see!" is inane and disingenuous. Any journalist with that little creativity should leave the business altogether, and I don't believe Bornfeld is that guy. Yet since he's writing a column about the MEDIA BUSINESS in which he has certainly advocated transparency, this dud of a swan song is especially pathetic.

[Disclosure: I generally do not comment on the local TV news biz because my partner is an executive at KSNV, Channel 3, so it's awkward and compromising. While some suggest I have a bias in my print-media commentary toward Greenspun Media because I write a column for GMG's Las Vegas Weekly, I suspect the likes of Ralston, Joe Schoenmann, Robin Leach, Delen Goldberg, David McGrath Schwartz, John Katsilometes and others would agree I haven't laid off on GMG when the spirit moves me.]

* Speaking of the TV, I was on it on Friday with KSNV's Jim Snyder discussing the hullabaloo surrounding the Electric Daisy Carnival at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Here's my part:

So far, so good with EDC, by the by. No serious injuries or hospitalizations to speak of.

* Tangentially, I was fascinated to find this cartoon about the EDC on the R-J's editorial page:


(It's four frames, so I've excerpted it for the purposes of illustration as I didn't want to be sued for providing the whole thing.)

It's worth noting because at first I thought this meant that Las Vegas jitters over EDC had scored so high on the national radar that a political cartoonist had opted to make fun of it. And not just any, but Ted Rall, a nationally syndicated cartoonist who is presently the president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He's also an award-winning columnist.

So I looked around online to find the cartoon and see where else it had run. I couldn't find it. So I went back to look more closely and I found this...


...in between panels. Which means the R-J had commissioned Rall to draw this specifically for the newspaper. I had reported a few months ago that the R-J had fired its longtime political cartoonist, Jim Day, and bemoaned the expected lack of cartoons commenting on local issues since then. So I'm fascinated by the notion that the R-J is evidently paying syndicated cartoonists -- and very prominent ones -- from outside the city to do Vegas-related work.

* In today's column, Greenspun Publisher Brian Greenspun says out loud what I've been saying for years regarding why the Las Vegas Sun faced its massive layoffs and suffered such internal strife. You'll recall that I criticized a Las Vegas CityLife cover story by Amy Kingsley that basically suggested the paper's woes were brought on by internal conflicts between the print and online sides and suggested that it was the company's money-bleeding -- perhaps because of a failed online strategy -- that led to workforce reductions.

I argued -- and then-publisher Geoff Schumacher slapped back harsh at me -- that Kingsley's piece missed the point, failed to take into account the entire situation and was ultimately a failure. To respond to Schumacher, who felt the story was just dandy as it was, I wrote:

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).

In today's column, Greenspun praises George Maloof for sticking with The Palms and not declaring bankruptcy or using the other easier ways to reorganize and paper over his business problems. Along the way, he tossed in this nugget:

By way of full disclosure, my family has not escaped the bludgeoning that has been leveled without discrimination across the country. Actually, the heartache has been disproportionately felt in those areas that relied on real estate and gaming. Throw in the media collapse, and it appears that my family hit the triple jackpot.

Ta-da! THAT is why his family reduced their workforce, shut down CineVegas, rejiggered all sorts of things. Not because the guy running the online department had singlehandedly run the enterprise into the ground, as Kingsley shouted from her cover story. But because, as I said before, the losses on every front were so grave they decided they couldn't bleed THAT MUCH from their media holdings. That was the story then, and CityLife missed it.

* Two random pieces from the Sunday paper that intrigued me:

• Sonya Padgett's feature on all the folks who sell water and art on the pedestrian bridges on the Strip. People make $1,000 a day reselling bottles of water in the summer? Holy cow.
• Paul Harasim's piece on the fact that not a single Nevada pharmacy has participated in a two-year-old program that asks them to donate unused cancer medication to a pill bank for those who can't afford them.
  

* Big congrats to KNPR and its crew for the 2,000th episode Friday of the indispensable local talk program State of Nevada. Host Dave Becker had me, R-J columnist John L. Smith and frequent host Ian Mylchreest on to assess Vegas as it stands and peer into the crystal ball about what happens next. I was honored to have been asked, and you can hear that episode here.

As I left the studio, I told KNPR General Manager Flo Rogers they should re-air the very first episode of the show or put it in the podcast feed, and she told me it is available in their online archives. I believe she may be mistaken, as I went to look so I could provide the link and the earliest episode available is from Oct. 31, 2003. It's clearly not the first***, as the commentary from Robert Fielden references previous requests for feedback from listeners. It's also available only for playing on Real Player. Here's hoping that for history and curiosity's sake, they go ahead and post their first episode and make it downloadable.

***UPDATE: Flo Rogers says the 10/31/03 episode is, in fact, the first hour of State of Nevada. I haven't listened to all of it to see if that is ever acknowledged on the air, but I will do so soon.

My Only Reaction

So Sad Shermy wrote another diatribe responding to this. Given that his premise is that I don't value the fight against copyright theft and that's so obviously untrue to anyone who can read or listen to the radio, I can't see the point of bothering to rebut any of his other silliness. Besides, it appears his many commenters have handled that for me. I'll let you go find it for yourself if you wish, but I'm not all that eager to perpetuate this nonsense. My remarks are analysis of facts; his are just invented inanity. You can't argue with invented inanity.

But I am fascinated by one particular comment on Sad Shermy's blog from none other than unceremoniously dumped former editor Thomas Mitchell, whose lengthy tenure at the helm was honored by the company with about a full sentence deep in a news release. Here's what he wrote about my prior post regarding the debacle in which Righthaven, the law firm partnering with the R-J to sue folks who lifted their material, got spanked in court:

I really don't care what Friess has to say on any topic. But I take considerable umbrage with the last paragraph of his meandering screed:

"It's quite unlikely that Thevenot would've been able to cover this quite so properly if Sherm were still in charge. So there's that."

I assure you Friess was never in any position whatsoever to evaluate the integrity, ethics or journalistic values of anyone in management at the newspaper. If Sherm were still in charge, if anything, the story might've gotten more prominent play.

I defend that stance against all comers.

That is a stunning moment of dishonesty and imperiousness if ever there was one. EVERY reader is in a position to evaluate the integrity, ethics and journalistic values of a publication and its editorial choices. This perspective tracks back to that time that Mitchell wrote a column about how much he despised bloggers because they borrow and reference other work. That post borrowed and referenced Orwell, but he didn't catch the irony. Mitchell's had a rough go of the changes in the business, as reflected in that column as well as this comment, because, essentially, he found it maddening that he and his no longer could decide who gets to voice their views. Mitch couldn't dictate or moderate the public discourse anymore thanks to the Internet, and it drove him bananas.

But beyond that, I find it pretty hilarious that Mitchell suggests Sad Shermy would have dictated bigger, broader coverage of this week's action in which a judge smacked around Sad Shermy and his lawyers for possibly deceiving the courts. He can try to "defend that stance to all comers," except there's this little problem:


That's a search of the Review-Journal archive for the term "Righthaven." It may look like a lot, but five of the eight entries are actually blog posts by Sad Shermy. That means that in the course of the past year, as more than 200 Righthaven lawsuits were being filed and this unusual way to combat copyright fraud was being covered intensively by the national/journalism/tech media, the R-J printed a grand total of THREE proper news stories and no letters.

It gets better! The first, as I mentioned, was when they sued Senate candidate Sharron Angle. The second was when they sued the Drudge Report. And the third was yesterday, when a judge castigated them for alleged dishonesty.

Tom Mitchell and Sad Shermy were fired in November. Two of the three of those pieces ran after that. So they presided over precisely one single story on their nationally newsworthy and unique campaign against copyright fraud.

Yet Mitchell would like us to believe he and Sad Shermy would have INSISTED on full, ever more prominent coverage of this decision! Because, uh, they committed all of 482 words to the matter under their oversight of the newspaper?

As the kids say: For realz?

The Vegas Media's Mobile Troubles

UPDATE: As of Friday morning, the RJ had turned off its mobile redirect function, presumably to fix it. So far, neither KSNV nor KLAS have made any changes.


So the Review-Journal now has a mobile site for smart phones in so-called "beta" form. This was as promised by Michael Hengel, the new editor, in my interview last month. Great.

Except there's one itsy bitsy problem, as Hunter Hillegas first pointed out to me and has blogged: It doesn't work.

Watch what happens. Say I see their columnist, Steve Sebelius, tweet links stories like so:


And say I am intrigued by Brian Sandoval's secret plan to raise taxes or must know whether the DoJ will indict John Ensign. I click on those links and I get...


...nothing relevant. I'm directed to the main menu for the R-J's mobile site. If you're lucky enough that the story you're after is still atop the pile, you win! If not, bummer! This also happens when you get a full story link, so it's not a function of the shortened URLs on Twitter. Try it. It's fun! And renders the mobile thing worthless.

Now, it would be all too easy to just beat up on the R-J, as Jon Ralston is congenitally inclined. But his own TV station has exactly the same problem. It's funny, too, because Ralston apologized via Twitter for a "bad link" to video of the mayoral debate he hosted yesterday...



...but it's not the link that's the problem. It's that MyNews3.Com's mobile site forces everyone on a smartphone here:


In fact, none of the Vegas MSM mobile sites work quite right. Channel 8, KLAS-TV, has the same R-J and KSNV issue where you end up here...


...rather than on the story you're seeking. In fact, Channel 8's mobile landing is so busy, you don't even see any headlines, much less the one you want to find. It's nice that you can get the "classic" version, but you still end up on the front page, not at the story someone told you on Twitter or via email was worth your attention. By the time I'm there, I don't care anymore and I leave. Fail.

KTNV is better. Someone sends you a link to a specific story and, lo and behold, you are rerouted to that story:


My problem with KTNV, however, is that you don't get a link or any obvious way of watching the report. It's on the proper website, but not readily available on the mobile version. At the very bottom, there is this...


...but if you click on video, you get the general video menu of stories. Seeing how these are TV stations, you'd think they'd want you to see the TV version of the report.

Fox 5 is the only one that doesn't have a mobile site, but at least you end up on the right page with the right story and all the rest of the content they provide including the video.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Sun has a problem of its own that's similar to KTNV's. Yes, you end up being re-routed to the story you're trying to find. But that's it. Yesterday, for instance, Ralston reported that Mayor Oscar Goodman had sent out a self-congratulatory and thinly veiled Carolyn campaign flier at taxpayer expense. So I go to the link on my iPhone and I see Ralston inform me in his final sentence...


...to see the mailer "at right." And I looked. All I saw was my coffee cup. It wasn't there. Granted, they have a fix for that; you can switch to the normal site and it takes you to the correct story with all the content. But why should I have to do that? Why can't I find the link to the document a journalist wants to show me wherever I land?

I haven't poked around yet in the TV stations' smart phone applications. (Neither newspaper has one yet, although Hengel made it sound like the R-J would debut its any minute now.) That's worthwhile, and I'll take a look soon.

But it's also not relevant to this topic. The idea of a mobile site is to make it easier for people to see the content they're seeking in a format conducive to the device on which they seek it. If you're not going directly to the story you want, if you can't see the video or the important illustrations and attachments that come along with it, you've failed.

Come on, guys. I'm heading outta town. Let's hope when I get where I'm going, I'll be able to keep up without having to try this hard. Or is that what you're trying to sabotage?

VIDEO: CNN MisID's Giffords Suspect, Apologizes, Does it Again

Update: CNN and a friend of the kid whose photo was used both called, asked me to blur the non-suspect's image. So here's a new version of the video and a second blog post is coming. -sf

One of the most horrifying and irresponsible days in American journalism just got measurably worse when CNN, at about 8:59 p.m. PT apologized for airing a photo they said was Jared Lee Loughner, suspect in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and slaying of six in Tucson. Lemon explained that the image they had shown of a young man at a sporting event was taken from Loughner's Facebook page archives and that CNN was sorry for the error.

Then, about two minutes later at the top of the hour, CNN showed the same erroneous image again. It's stunning enough that ripping something off Facebook and not bothering to check the accuracy is what's done in the highest circles of American journalism today. But to get it wrong, apologize and then do it again is absolutely unbelievable.

The entire day has been appalling. First, of course, there was Reuters and NPR reporting the Rep. Giffords was dead. She wasn't, but all manner of credible news folk, including Ben Smith and Jon Ralston, retweeted it:


Next there was the bizarre spectacle of Fox, MSNBC and CNN going on all day about vitriol in politics and Sarah Palin's personal responsibility in this without having any specific information about the alleged gunman's motives. Also, if anyone is responsible for the vicious partisanship in this country, it's Fox and MSNBC first and second, with CNN in third for inventing the TV shoutfest concept with "Crossfire." Then, maybe somewhere down on the list might be Palin and other incendiary camera whores who are products, not the engineers, of this dynamic.

Speaking of camera whores and a lack of perspective, Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. went on the air to twice call the Arizona shooting a "dastardly deed" -- greatly offending the Joker, Dr. Evil and Lex Luthor, no doubt, because they figured they had the corner on the "dastardly" market -- but also claimed this was the worst "dastardly deed" he's seen in his lifetime. Apparently he shrugged off 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Mumbai attacks or Columbine.

I loved when he went on later to Tweet this:


Unspeakable, and yet there is he blubbering along on TV, huh? See, that's what I'd love to see, this guy tell Fox's producers, "No, no, I can't come on. This is just unspeakable. I cannot speak to it." Tee hee.

Finally, our local media in Vegas was utterly worthless. The Review-Journal sent out just a single news flash or Tweet about what was happening in Tucson:


You know what we got LOADS of info about from the Review-Journal's Tweeter today? Every frigging bowel movement by everyone on the Runnin' Rebels.

And nobody locally seems to have noticed the one Vegas-related connection: The owner of the Golden Nugget, Tilman Fertitta, flew Giffords' husband from Texas to Tucson on his private jet. Nicely done, folks!

Wait, Wait Does Hula Hoops!

Yes!!!

For the second time in my career, I've achieved a supreme honor: "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" on NPR used one of my pieces for humor. Given that I cover Vegas, it's sort of stunning that it doesn't happen more often. Certainly, more stories I've handled have hit the national joke circuit before, but it's not that big a buzz when they're stories EVERYONE covers.

In this case, it became clear my AOL News piece on the potential hula hoop ban inspired this week's "Bluff the Listener" segment when Paula Poundstone (!!!) cited the quote Las Vegas City Councilman Stavros Anthony gave me: "These aren't little Hula-Hoops. They're big Hula-Hoops." (Fair's fair, though: The Review-Journal's Alan Choate covered it first, leading to my piece. But the use of my quote indicates the NPR show didn't know.) They even went back to Anthony for a version of this comment for radio.

Listen to it by clicking here. It's about six fun minutes long. Go ahead. I'll wait.

It's particularly fun because I'm in New York at my aunt's and we've got NPR on live as we get ready to depart for Fairbanks, Alaska, on some family business. After thousands of bylines in all these major publications over all these years, my aunt's glee over this odd achievement was still a kick.

In case you're wondering what the first time was for me and "Wait Wait," it was in October 2007 when I wrote for USA Today about a new technology to perform full scalp transplants for bald people using the scalps of cadavers.

[Earlier: My blog post on the original story.]

Casino-hating Philly Paper Now Taking Bets

Now that the fine folks at the Philadelphia Inquirer have done their part to run the world's most respected casino developer out of town and create a toxic environment for anyone even considering opening a gaming establishment in the city of Brotherly Love, what are they doing for an encore?

You'll never believe it.

They're opening up their own casino. Online.

Really.

According to the journalism trade publication Editor & Publisher, the newspaper's website, Philly.Com, is the first in the nation to offer online sports betting. From E&P:

In a partnership with FanDuel, a British online betting company, visitors to Philly.com Instant Fantasy Games can play and win in one-day online fantasy sports games that pay off in real money.

Bettors pick a team from players in scheduled Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association or National Hockey League games that day. If their team wins the fantasy contest, Philly.com says, there are "instant cash prizes -- win tonight!" Users pay a $5 entry fee for each game and can win as much as $90 a game.

Online gambling is illegal in the United States, but there is an exception for fantasy sports. The difference in the FanDuel partnership is that the fantasy team, rather than performing over the season of a sport, can be assembled for just a single day.

"Thanks to the fantasy sports carve out in the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act, these instant fantasy games are legal in the U.S. -- something that the FanDuel team has been very careful to adhere to," FanDuel said in its announcement of the partnership.

"FanDuel and its partners generate revenue from taking a commission on each game."

[snip]

"With the much publicized downturn in advertising revenues, could these games, at least in part, save the newspaper industry?" the press release asked.

According to FanDuel, U.K. newspapers are generating "millions of dollars in online revenue" from betting and paid games. With sports betting legal in Britain, newspapers are able to offer more lucrative betting possibilities.

FanDuel claims some players are winning more than $16,000 in a month.

I'm in awe. The very same newspaper that attacked its politicians for attempting to plug budget holes with legalized gambling now wants to using a loophole in the online gaming law to overcome its own dwindling revenues?


These are the same folks who, only two days ago, cackled over Wynn's retreat and declared this:

Making it easier and legal to bet on sports will only create more problem gamblers. It could also undermine the credibility of the games. (See the Chicago Black Sox and other betting scandals involving athletes.)

Right. So the Philadelphia Inquirer says building a brick-and-mortar casino that would create actual jobs and that would take effort for adults to visit would be a scourge on the city. But the Philadelphia Inquirer thinks it's good to go up with a website where people can place bets without getting dressed and on which there's really way of telling whether the gambler is of age or not.

Congrats, Mr. Wynn. You got out of this funhouse just in time.

Also, how is it the Review-Journal hasn't done this yet? Who would you feel better about placing an online bet with, some casino-hating Philly newspaper or a paper with a legitimate claim to the gambling brand known around the world, Las Vegas?

Of course, I know why the R-J's not in on it. Hell, their Online Guy seems to believe today is the first time an advertisement has ever been Tweeted. No, really. This is what he wrote today:

Every day there are roughly 50 million tweets zipping through cyberspace. Until today, none of them were paid ads.

Yes, Twitter's new promoted Tweets thing started today, but had Al Gibes paid any attention (attended?) BlogWorld right here in Vegas last October, he would've known that popular individuals have been taking money for sponsored Tweets for so long that the FTC put out rules about it.

But I digress. It doesn't surprise anyone (anymore) that the R-J's Web operation is run by total incompetents. But it should stun us all that the Philadelphia newspaper jump head first into the very depraved, predatory, evil racket that it has spent years attacking.

More from E&P:

FanDuel said "Philly.com is proving to be a true pioneer by becoming the first online news publication to use the power of daily fantasy sports games to open up a new revenue frontier."

Yeah. That's what they wanted to be known for.

The Vegas Poll That Went Awry

I noticed on Dave McKee's blog that he was touting the fact that he's been "short-listed" for best Vegas blog by the folks at Las Vegas CityLife in their annual reader survey. He's a regular contributor and didn't disclose that in that blog item, but OK. Anyhow, I was curious, of course, to see if this blog had received a similar honor, so I headed to the site on Saturday to check it out.

Sadly, the site accused me of trying to double-vote, see?


Uh, no. I have not. My memory's bad, but it's not THAT bad. So I tried again on other computers, tried cleaning out the cookies, tried other browsers. Alas, still no luck. Then I went to Twitter and asked others to try it and everyone else who did had the same problem.

Now this poll had been up for MORE THAN A WEEK (according to McKee's post) and has had a full-page ad in the print edition promoting it, so I was a little surprised when CityLife editor Steve Sebelius Tweeted back that he'd "check" on the problem. That meant that a major Vegas publication had had a broken poll for ages and nobody bothered to tell anyone? Nobody over there even noticed? When there's a broken link on this blog, I get a half-dozen emails on it within an hour. But OK.

Anyhow, just now, I tried again. And voila, I got in. Sort of. I answered the first 50 questions but, when I tried to advance to the next part, it froze. In fact, it's been 20 minutes now and the site is STILL saying:


Fascinating. I suspect this is the work of the crack Stephens Media tech staff that brought us search bars that, a week into the fab Review-Journal redesign, still don't show the user what he/she is typing. Try it yourself! See?


Saddest part is once CityLife actually fixes its poll problems, I betcha a deck of Chippendales playing cards it's going to remember my IP address and tell me...


P.S. How does Dave McKee know he's short-listed for best blog if the poll's not in the print edition and nobody can get to that part of the poll online? (I still don't know if this blog has been nominated.)

P.P.S. I'll have more to say about the poll once I can actually take all of it, but I'm already perturbed. Some of the items short-listed aren't even open anymore and there's no opportunity to write-in a choice. The latter makes the entire poll, already simply a promotional exercise, even more irrelevant and gamed.

Sunday Media Musings for Tourists

I caught up on some of the media I had missed this week this morning and wanted to point out a few things:

* NFL fans ought to bookmark this Review-Journal link so they know which bars to go to to watch their games with like-minded fans. I've used this in the past on the podcast as a Top Secret Tourist Tip of the Week, a very useful guide that more tourists ought to use. Cool interface, too. When I say bookmark it, though, I mean it, because you'll never find it again on that ridiculous website if you don't.

* If you want to hear something truly, positively weird, listen to the first five minutes or so of KNPR host Dave Berns' "State of Nevada" interview on Wednesday morning with comic Bill Cosby. Honest to God, I have no idea what Cosby is saying and Berns' valiant efforts to make sense of it was fruitless, too. But since it's Cosby, there's something fascinating about it anyway. I'm not all the way through this interview yet, but already I know it's going to be a thrilling mess.

* I just noticed that Life Magazine's website now offers a pretty photo album of 26 Cirque du Soleil photos. They call it "Cirque du Soleil's Freakiest Acts" and, really, it's not, but the photography is terrific, colorful and fun. Downside: Only three Vegas images -- I think just one of an actual moment in one of their six-going-on-seven shows -- and none of its best, most eye-popping and "freakiest" show, Ka.

* Two Las Vegas Weekly pieces (other than my own column, natch) are of great tourist interest this week. First, Dr. Dave Schwartz of UNLV and DieisCast.Com stands up for you (and us) against the presumption that people who love Vegas and gambling are stupid. Then Richard Abowitz writes glowingly about RateVegas.Com's Hunter Hillegas' groundbreaking Vegas Mate iPhone app. Buy it at the iTunes store or win a subscription by being right and being picked in my show's biweekly trivia questions, by the way. And unlike that Monte Carlo-Hotel 32 thing we debunked recently, this is a real app.

Is Raided Pharmacy Linked To Steroids Indictment?

The answer to that provocative question is: No. At least not from anything I can tell. And I checked.

I was waiting yesterday to see if anyone in the media would attempt to connect Applied Pharmacy Services in Las Vegas, which was raided by the DEA and LAPD in connection with the probe into Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson's personal doctor, with a company known as American Pharmacy Solutions in Mobile, Alabama, that was hit earlier this year with a 198-count indictment in a widespread steroids distribution scandal.

Why would anyone confuse the two? Because if you Google "Applied Pharmacy Services," the first two responses are links to some blog that had posted about the Alabama company which is, in fact, named in an indictment as "Applied Pharmacy Services."


Then, if you dig a little deeper and Google "Applied Pharmacy Services, Mobile, AL," you get this:


BUT...the trail grows cold when you click on that link. Then you find yourself on the website of American Pharmacy Solutions. It's a mail-order pharmaceuticals company. They don't have branches or locations. They're not even called Applied Pharmacy Services.

I suspect many other journalists followed this necessary bunny trail to its conclusion as I did for my New York Times piece on yesterday's raid. I called up the Mobile, Ala., place. Asked if they had offices in Las Vegas, were tied to this pharmacy that had been raided. They said no. They could be lying or they could have changed their name since the indictment, that's true, and nobody from the Vegas pharmacy could be reached by anyone in the press yesterday to check it out. But it appears to be a coincidence.

Unfortunately, my private prediction proved correct; someone in the press did report that these were the same company without, so far as I can tell, being able to confirm it. I'm surprised to say it, but it was the normally spot-on Las Vegas Sun.


This information (in that middle paragraph there) didn't appear in anybody else's reports. Not the Associated Press's, not the Review-Journal's. Not even TMZ. So, did the Las Vegas Sun have some great big scoop that everybody else in the press somehow overlooked even though it was the very first thing that came up on Google? The media wouldn't pounce with two feet on the notion that a pharmacy involved in the Jacko case also has an 198-count steroid indictment against them?

As I said, the two could still be related. But I don't know anyone at this stage who has confirmed it. And the lack of being able to confirm something as simple as shared corporate parentage leads me to the conclusion that the Sun jumped the gun this time.

OMG! Great Economic News From Vegas!

Hahahaha....just funnin' ya. What, you think it's 2007 or something?

The January year-over-year data is out from the LVCVA and I'm not going to bother you with the depressing details. That, after all, is the Review-Journal's job. All I'll say is that I searched for a silver lining and the best I could come up with is that convention attendance in Laughlin was up a whopping 14.6 percent. God knows -- or cares -- why. If spending time with crappy economic stats is your idea of a thrill, then go read the LVCVA's report for yourself.

If you're delusional, you might take comfort in February real estate data, which showed a 108 percent rise in single-home sales in Las Vegas versus February 2008. Sounds great until you realize that the median value of those homes fell almost 37 percent in the same period.

All that said, the stock market was kind to Vegas today. Heck, MGM Mirage even hit $3 a share for a moment and closed up 23.18 percent at $2.87. Wynn Resorts did better, though, rising 25.4 percent, to $19.50. Woo hoo. Happy days are here again!

[Photo credit: Make Things Interesting]

Time To Blow Our Brains Out!

At least that's how I feel when I open up an unceasingly bleak Business section to read this headline...


I'm not blaming anyone. It's awful out there. But I just had to emit a rueful laugh when I saw this one. Guess what, folks? We're all even more broke than we thought! Read on!!!

I'd rather not. Instead, I figured this would be the right moment to provide a smile. So click on the image below and enjoy Sunday's utterly brilliant Argyle Sweater, with its layers of cleverness:


And now, back into the kitchen I go. Much cooking and preparing to be done!

This N That

I've been a neglectful blogger lately, mostly because I've been immersing myself in studying up for a few larger projects. But there were a few very random things I've been meaning to say. So here goes:

1. Brendan Buhler rocks. I've been meaning to say this for quite a long time now. Buhler is a staffer at the Las Vegas Sun and he almost always, consistently makes me at least smile, if not laugh out loud. In a newspaper largely devoted to a diet of in-depth pieces on politics, health, education and science, it is a relief sometimes when Buhler does one of his trademark pieces about battling with his swamp cooler, beard-trimming mania or resale graves. Sometimes he does odd topics that I also notice but would have no place to write about, such as his effort to debunk a recent ad campaign claiming to cool a house on a hair dryer's power usage. There's substance and an engaging point of view behind his writing and reporting, which is why it's not just clowning around stuff. And no, I'm NOT just saying this because this week I got to be the target of his shaming for my incorrect O.J. predictions on the Papa Joe Chevalier show. I've been tearing out a stack of Buhler pieces to mention here for months now. But, yes, it is an honor to be embarrassed by a pro.

2. A few more good things. Check out Benjamin Spillman's R-J piece on the conflict at Forum Shops over where patrons of the Poetry nightclub should be lined up. Also from Sunday, Corey Levitan did a terrific job going through the history and current circumstances of nine Old Vegas structures that somehow have averted wrecking balls. Liz Benston at the Sun had a really interesting report about how South Point has avoided laying off workers that I found refreshing amid the sea of economic-news misery we're all drowning in.

3. A few less good things. I really, really wish the R-J would stop John Przybys from doing his Entertainment Weekly knockoff feature on Sundays because, as you can see, it's unoriginal AND usually not terribly funny. (I probably shouldn't say that today because, as I recall from my days at the R-J, Przybys and I share today as our birthday, but that's how I feel. Happy birthday, though, John.) And I'm really sorry to hear that Jane Ann Morrison broke her inlay on a caramel that she says brings her, uh, "soulful satisfaction," (?!?) but wasn't she just last month moralizing about not wasting precious time and space on meaningless stories of little importance? Just sayin'. Now, Brendan Buhler might've turned that costly misfortune into something funny and socially relevant.

4. And Now, A Total Non-Sequitur. I was catching up on newspaper reading the other day and came across this question by a Dick Case of Petroleum, W. Va., asking if there are other kinds of ketchup besides the red tomato-based variety. I had no idea. Could make a good column for Jane, actually.

These crazy days

So yesterday, they found Steve Fossett's plane and maybe a bit of his remains and the jury got the O.J. Simpson armed robbery case. I handled both simultaneously for The New York Times, earning myself two bylines on the same page. Kinda cool. Here's my Fossett output, and here's my Simpson piece.

Now here I am (literally, see me to your right appearing to pimp for Aquafina) waiting for that very O.J. verdict as well as the verdict in the case of who gets to use the Plaza name. Hard to believe, but both trials took the same amount of time and now both verdicts are coming on the same day -- or not!

Since I'm in this holding pattern, I've already written and filed the piece to go up on the Times website when we know there's about to be an OJ verdict. We'll be getting two hours notice on that. We'll add and subtract material from that framework once the verdict occurs and the various players become available to talk about it.

Meanwhile, I've got to read Tony Curtis' autobiography over the weekend. I've got the print exclusive on the book and interview the legend next week for a major paper. Podcast listeners will get to hear that interview the following week after the article appears.

All this has made me -- and evidently everyone in the media -- forget that it was five years ago today that illusionist Roy Horn was attacked by a tiger on stage. Even Norm Clarke of the R-J acknowledged Roy's birthday today -- yes, he was attacked on his birthday -- but didn't realize the anniversary. Here's my 2003 report on the incident from the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe.

Oh, did I mention I've had a massive headache for several days? Such a trooper.

Is this tasteless?

You're thinking what I'm thinking, right?

This shot by David Becker was the major photo on the front of the business section of the Review-Journal today with a piece by Benjamin Spillman about concerns of FAA officials about all the tall buildings sprouting in Las Vegas.

I get that this may have seemed like one of the few ways to illustrate the potential danger here which is, presumably, that planes could bump into the towers. Actually, though, the story doesn't really discuss such collisions; it's less about safety and much more about air traffic control problems and congestion which, certainly, does have safety implications. But the article largely leaves the disastrous outcome unsaid, probably because there are lots of huge cities with zillions of skyscrapers that have never seen a plane-v-building crash. Usually, it takes a suicidal maniac or 19 to make that happen deliberately.

In this post-9/11 world, I found the image chilling and wondered if I was the only one. Just consider how long Becker must have spent waiting to get this faux-apocalyptic shot. Didn't someone stop and wonder how a terrorism-scarred public might react?

I just love this story

James Haug of the Review-Journal has an incredibly entertaining piece in yesterday's paper about a functionally illiterate school board candidate -- endorsed by the teacher's union no less! -- whose website was riddled with misspellings, bad grammar and a few other missteps we usually don't sanction in people in charge of major educational institutions.

The candidate, Deanna Wright, seems utterly baffled as to why this is a problem and surely feels she's being picked on by the newspaper. I disagree; serviceable writing ability seems like a reasonable prerequisite to becoming a trustee of a multibillion-dollar operation, don't you think? Read it here and decide for yourself.

The R-J wisely saved a pdf of the site and houses it with the story so that it could live on after the candidate fixed it, which she has done. Even so, Wright's site is worth checking out anyway for its sheer lameness. I'm particularly fond of her opening Flash screen. It's admirable that she wants to get involved, but that's what the PTA is for. And hey, if she plays her cards right someday she could be on the Republican presidential ticket. Ya never know.

The whole thing reminded me of one of my favorite R-J stories from my tenure in Haug's job covering education for the newspaper. The Clark County School District had just created its first website back in 1997 and the mother of an incoming kindergartner called to point me to it. Here's the start of my story from June 3, 1997, which you can find here:

To enroll you're childeren in kunderfarden, it is improtant and nessary to bring a coppy of a utility bull, even in outlaying areas.

Or so read the World Wide Web sites of the Clark County School District, which included those misspellings and dozens of others in instructions for how to register for school and how to interest children in reading.

It was so appalling that the mom decided to find the money to put her kid in private school. Good call. Kind of cute, though, to see how we wrote about the Internet as this newfangled thingie a scant 11 years ago.

BREAKING: R-J's "Breaking News" Is Day Old

OMG! Look at what big story the R-J just broke:


Oh, wait. That's right. We broke that story 6 hours earlier. And the action of the judge? That was yesterday.

For shame. Whenever I pick up a story from the R-J, I credit it appropriately. Why don't they feel the same obligation to other outlets?

Other interesting stuff from Sunday's paper...

Amid the acres and acres of very, very predictable opinion pieces on the election in both Vegas papers today -- I'm just shocked, shocked! that the R-J's Erin Neff found Obama's speech on Thursday exciting and that the editorial board would be impressed by Gov. Sarah Palin's resume -- there was some actually interesting stuff.

* The R-J came through again with an extremely useful clip-n-save feature laying out at what bars and restaurants football fans can flock to watch their favorite NFL teams play. This would appear to be a lot of painstaking work and incredibly useful both to local Las Vegans, given we don't now and probably never will have a team of our own, as well as tourists who want to be amongst their brethren on Sundays. We used this feature on Aug. 17, 2007 as a Top Secret Tourist Tip of the Week for "The Strip" podcast, and I'm happy they decided to update and republish it. Check it out here and bookmark it if you are so inclined. If my New York Jets are doing well -- big if, seeing how they play with the cast-off formerly great parts of other teams and all -- I may find myself at the Bunkhouse Saloon myself. Now, R-J, how about doing a similar feature for baseball and basketball? (If you have and I missed it, I apologize.)

* The casinos in the Gulf Coast region are shutting down this weekend in advance of Hurricane Gustav. I'd love to point you to Howard Stutz's short piece in the R-J today detailing this, but I cannot locate it anywhere on their fabulous website or even indexed in Google News. Of course, everyone's hoping this storm isn't as bad as advertised. But it did make me wonder something. How is it there haven't been any punishing typhoons beating the crap out of Vegas' other significant colony, Macau? Tis the season. I recall several times when I was in Asia typhoons did intense amounts of damage. Just something that crossed my minds; look for this to happen sooner or later.

* Norm Clarke's lead item about Tom Riccio, the guy who set up the OJ-Palace Station confrontation that is forcing me to sit in a courtroom for much of September waiting to see if The Juice finally get it, is just utterly chilling. Riccio strikes me as the very worst, the most cynical and corrupt sort of being our celebrity-scandal checkbook-journalism culture has produced. He set up the incident in the first place to sell the audio tapes, which he did. And now he's selling ad space on his limo for $7,500, dinner with him the night of his testimony for $5,000 and you can pay $6,000 to wear a hat with your logo. This is just pathetic. There's a whole site devoted to what he'll do for how much money. Ick. Maybe we can scrape together the money to get him to wear a hat that reads, "I am a disgusting human being and I have no shame." It's really hard for many people to feel sympathy for O.J. Simpson, but this guy helps.

* The Travel Industry Association has been wasting its members' money for the past two weeks taking out full-page ads in certain tourism-dependent cities and presidential battleground states including Vegas demanding first Obama and now McCain offer a plan to rescue the nation's travel business in their convention acceptance speeches. This is an expensive media campaign -- spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, it would appear -- that results in precisely nothing. Do they really think that either candidate is going to lay out a plan to help one particular industry? I'm not saying that there aren't good reasons for this trade group to raise awareness of its issues, but it's ridiculous to write something to either candidate that reads: "We want to hear a real plan from Senator McCain/Obama to help make travel and tourism in the U.S. work better for travelers and millions who serve them." You can't just come out of nowhere and make such a demand on the eve of each man's most important public moment. When neither of them respond -- and neither will -- then what? Condemn them? Sure, that'll get them caring what you've got to say next time.

Told Ya So: 73 Fired At Trump

KVBC-TV's Steve Crupi reported last night a terrific scoop -- the Review-Journal doesn't even have it today -- that the Trump International Hotel & Tower is in such doldrums they're firing 73 employees. That's a fifth of the workforce. Me thinks this is more proof that they'll never build the second tower in the image used below behind the anchors.


Gee, what's that I wrote in the Weekly just last week? Oh! That's right: "We in the media will also be writing many stories in coming years about the struggle of this property. It is the best-executed version of the worst-considered idea in Vegas today."

Crupi reports that the layoffs are due to the lack of closings caused by the mortgage meltdown. But didn't Mr. Trump tell Howard Stutz in the Review-Journal a month ago: "Some of my buyers are richer than the banks! We're working with people and I think we're doing pretty well!"

And, of course, there's this little gem of a bald-faced lie from The Apprentice champ Stefanie Schaeffer, marketing veep for Trump’s Vegas project, on "The Strip" in March when asked about the impact of the credit crunch:

“We’re in the process of closing right now, and thus far we haven’t really had a problem. Everything’s been going pretty smoothly. Then again, when you talk about Cosmo and you talk about some of these other projects that stopped mid-construction or even pre-construction, you’re not talking about the Trump product, and the Trump brand carries again the Trump name, which pretty much says it all. People know they’re getting a level of excellence that is not only unsurpassed anywhere in the world but is something that speaks for itself. So even in a poor market, we’ve really been relatively unaffected.”

Ya don't say. If it wasn't for her hubris in talking smack about another project when she had to have known they were facing a rough road themselves, I might not rerun this quote so often.

(Disclosure: My partner, Miles, is executive producer at KVBC. He's also away tending to a family matter, so he was uninvolved in this post.)

Harrah's Gets Free Two-Page Ad From R-J!

OK, OK, not really. But it is interesting that Harrah's Entertainment, which kicked the local newspaper out of its guest rooms and off its newsstands and has not bought a single advertisement* in the paper for at least two weeks was nonetheless treated to being the focus of another a fun-filled column by Corey Levitan. Levitan writes a weekly Monday feature in which he does odd jobs about town, and today he's a Julius Caesar at Caesars Palace. (I'm usually a fan of Corey's work; as with any such feature, there are better and worse weeks. This one seemed a little too obvious, but I suppose it had to be done sooner or later.)

Of course, I do not advocate journalists ignoring Harrah's in retaliation for being retaliated against. It just struck me as interesting, is all. But hey, the publisher is evidently the last one to even realize he's being punished anyway, so whatever.

Two other things in today's paper. First, Norm Clarke picked up the item about Wynn and the golf course. Yay for us. And Doug Elfman had a terrific take on Oprah, Tina and the toilet chatter, too. Yay for Doug.

Oh, and many folks know I love my comics. I still read "For Better or For Worse" daily even though it long since lost its footing in realistic human interaction and this one cynically funny blog has forced me to look at it in a completely different light. But even given all that, I couldn't quite figure out why strange old John here thought it was romantic or sweet to show up with this massive pot as a floral surprise? Hasn't anyone in that art studio ever heard of a bouquet? She needs TWO HANDS to hold it! How is he ever gonna get any from her THAT way?

OK. Enough loitering. Back to work for me.

* There have been ads for the Harrah's Foundation, a non-profit arm not operated by the same corporate folks.