Review-Journal Fires Cartoonist, Online Guy, Too

The Associated Press broke news last week that the Review-Journal had eliminated its investigative unit and laid off five reporters. Many, and not in an ironic way, asked: "The R-J had an investigative unit?"

I'll get back to that question -- and the impact of those firings -- in a moment. But first I need to report that the R-J last week also fired its editorial cartoonist of 17 years, Jim Day, and the much-maligned Online Guy, Al Gibes, at right. These are two rather high-profile sackings and comes after, as I reported recently, they also fired the longtime business editor Michael Hiesiger.

The loss of Jim Day fits into a trend of dwindling numbers of staff editorial cartoonists in America's daily newspapers. It was actually surprising that the R-J kept him as long as they did because papers now see resident cartoonists as a luxury. What it means is that from here on, all editorial cartoons on the R-J's op-ed pages will be about national and international topics, not local ones. For that, we'll have to turn to the wonderful Sun cartoonist Mike Smith or that fellow in the View section who lampoons Oscar Goodman. It's a shame; Day wasn't as good or funny as Smith, but the more the merrier. (I would show you a few of Day's panels, but I seriously suspect Righthaven would sue me even though this is clearly commentary, so here's one and another.)

As for Gibes, I do feel badly for anyone who loses their job. I really do. But I also have felt for a very long time that this kind, clueless fellow had no place running the New Media operations of a major daily newspaper or writing about technology. He's that guy in every office who was good with the computer in the early 1990s and who somehow convinced the bosses that he was staying up on things when, in fact, he was letting the R-J fall hopelessly and often hilariously behind. Now they have the chance to bring in someone who can really redesign that horrid website and help the journalists there tell their stories in the more three-dimensional ways that are now available.

I've been torn about what to say about the loss of five "investigative" reporters. A.D. Hopkins was the head of this division and, so far as I could tell, was dead weight to the paper as far back as when I was there in the 1990s. He'd put out a couple of stories a year even then and none of them rocked anybody's world or changed Las Vegas in any perceptible way. Joan Whiteley, who also was let go, was responsible for the building-code exposes at various Harrah's properties and that was pretty solid stuff that was just very, very badly written. (She also broke the Vdara death ray story, btw.) Two others who left were Alan Maimon and Frank Geary, and I don't have any strong views on their tenures.

So while the division that was eliminated was not particularly productive, it's still not good for a newspaper as short-staffed as the R-J to reduce the number of local reporters. They need more. The nation's fifth largest school district, for instance, is covered by one reporter. In most cities this size, the newspapers have teams of education reporters. And that's just one example.

That said, sometimes you have to clear away some brush before you can grow properly. There's a sense of palpable fear among the old guard at the R-J that they could be next, and that's not a bad thing. Complacency is, especially in the current, fast-changing media era. The paper has a new publisher, Bob Brown, and a new editor, Michael Hengel, for the first time in two decades, so there will be blood.

Here's a prediction: Next to go will be Nate Tannenbaum, whose ridiculous daily TV-ish news segments are watched by virtually nobody. The production value is still laughable two years on and you can't embed it on a blog or download it on a smart phone, so the entire effort is just stupid. Nate, like A.D. and Al, is a very sweet guy. That doesn't mean that what he's doing is in any way relevant or worthwhile to the newspaper or its readers.

* * *

P.S. If you think I was wrong about how unceremoniously editor Thomas Mitchell and publisher Sherm Frederick were dumped take a look at how proudly and lovingly the newspaper announced that Geoff Schumacher, parent Stephens Media's director of community publications, is leaving the company to be publisher of a paper in Ames, Iowa. Nuff said. Except: Congrats, Geoff!

Sunday Foto Fun

I've been a bad blogger this week partly because I've been overwhelmed by deadlines and partly because all that traveling caught up to me with some exhaustion and possibly a cold. However, there's always room for some Foto Fun around here.

I don't even need to go far sometimes. This...


...was on my block this week. Do cement-mixing trucks in other cities sport paintings of those cities' skylines?

A few weeks ago, I took occasional guest-host Amy of GritstoGlitz.Com with me to a swanky soiree benefitting Families for Effective Autism Treatment of Southern Nevada at the Stirling Club at Turnberry Place. The event honored Tony and Jill Curtis, and Amy seemed nervous that Tony might be hostile toward me on account of my airing that interview in which he talked about semen on his leg and so on. He didn't even remember me. But this image...


...was creepily priceless, huh? Amy, that celebrity-stalking whore, also got this shot with Louis Anderson, who happened to sit at our table.


Meanwhile, I was at Palazzo a week ago for an interview for an upcoming Strip Sense column and saw this:


I might find all these umbrellas pretty is if wasn't so deritative of the Palazzo's neighbor to the north, Wynn Las Vegas, and the parasols hanging from the ceiling that were Roger Thomas' vision as seen here:

Also this...


...is a bit of a shame. The reflecting pool in the foreground is now completely crowded by potted plants used to be a lovely place to sit and eat an ice cream or sip a coffee. It's like they decided to copy all the best ideas at Wynn -- parasols, lots of live plants -- but in the lamest possible way.

Also, I thought this sign in the casino was strange:


It says "The Palazzo Offers A Smoke-Free Corridor." But what it doesn't say? WHERE. Didn't someone making this sign think, "We should probably give someone directions." Yeesh.

Last week, I was at the Hard Rock Hotel to take a glimpse at the new Joint. It's a much bigger venue than the old one and it looks like it'll be a great place to see a concert. It was neat that they preserved a piece of the old place with this...


...a plank of the old floor. Fun!

I am a little baffled, however, by something. This is the view from most of the balcony...


...but then here below is the view from the top four rows of the balcony:


You can see the stage but not really the video screens which, it would seem, would be MOST useful to patrons seated the farthest away. The overhang is the exposed ventilation and piping in the ceiling, part of the look of the place. But they couldn't make the ceiling of this new $60 million space a few feet higher so that the folks in the cheap seats -- otherwise known, often, as the biggest fans -- could see?

After leaving the Hard Rock, I drove west on Harmon toward the Strip to get where else I was going. And I must say that for as much as I ponder whether CityCenter was a good idea from a financial point of view, I am always awed by what they have grown on that plot of land:


I know some think it's kind of cold-looking, but there's something about standing in front of it that makes me gasp in wonderment. The piece of the equation nobody can foresee is whether, like real big cities, there will be lots of people creating the vibe and energy to make these skyscrapers hum.

While I have the floor, can anyone identify for me what kind of birds these are? I saw 'em in Hemenway Park in Boulder City while working on a travel piece for the Times earlier this month:


And, finally, I wasn't going to bother with this except that right now the Classiest Publisher in America is picking on me and Jon Ralston on his "blog" (it's still not indexed in Google's Blogsearch) for some banter we had on VegasPBS's "Nevada Week in Review" over the weekend. Conservatives have taken to use the term "teabagging" to refer to their recent protests against taxes and, in fact, that's also a term for a certain sex act. So Ralston and I had a little humor about that and the Classiest Publisher in America attacked us for it.

I'm not going to defend our banter because it was admittedly childish and probably a little baffling to the audience because part of the off-camera context was that we were running out of time and weren't going to get to discuss Gov. Gibbons' threatened veto of domestic partnership legislation pending in Carson City.

But being called out on it by a man who has essentially been called "really dumb" by Steve Wynn and "not sophisticated" by Elaine Wynn was odd. I don't know if he's either. But dishonest comes to mind.

Y'see, the Classiest Publisher in America has been claiming his abysmal disaster of a website to be this towering local success using data from a company called Hitwise that is the joke of the Web.

Of course, the Review-Journal's Web traffic is proprietary, so it's impossible to know what's really happening. Except that they just finally got themselves a YouTube channel for their ridiculous daily RJTV program. That means that there's some public information about interest in their content.

And guess what?


NOBODY'S WATCHING. OK, they've had a total of 10 views on nine episodes. And, full disclosure, I account for four of them. Sad. What's even sadder? Something tells me the Classiest Publisher in America -- or his employees -- account for the rest.

[P.S. to the Classiest Publisher in America: It's Friess, not Freiss. Check your archives. You've published that name hundreds of times.]

Amateur Three Minutes Runs Amok!

I swear I was going to leave this be for now, I really was. I'd had my fun and now it was time give the fine folks at RJTV a fighting chance to refine their product. But then I got a note from a prominent journalist urging me to take a look at today's edition of the daily news program.

So I did. And I'll say right now that it's difficult to know what part of this mess someone might find bizarre and blogworthy.

As I started watching, I wondered if my attention was being drawn to the fact that on RJTV, over-the-shoulder graphics get placed ON Nate Tannenbaum's shoulder by people unclear on the concept. You know, like this:


Not great, but hardly the worst sin. I mean, it's not like anyone's ever done this sort of programming before anywhere ever, right? Give them a break! They're inventing a wheel here. It takes practice!

So I kept watching. A few moments later, I was sure I had unearthed the priceless nugget to which I had been led when accused child rapist Chester Stiles, uh, ate Nate. Here's a digital flipbook, if you will:


Poor Nate! And poor Dude Who Didn't Know How Stupid That Looked And Published It On The Website Of A Professional Newspaper. Well, not poor DWDKHSTLaPIotWoaPN. He's got a job, as baffling as that may seem.

But ultimately, I really don't think that's why I was pointed to this thing today. I'm fairly certain my friend wanted me to see the R-J's publisher, Sherm Frederick, popping into the studio direct from the golf course and perhaps in need of a stronger SPF product.


Sherm was there to offer up a profound little life lesson: Capitalism = Good. The segment is not labeled as opinion, but that's probably DWDKHSTLaPIotWoaPN's fault anyway. The publisher, whom I assume has given more than a few public speeches in his time, nonetheless delivers his lines like that Boom Goes The Dynamite kid, leading us into a lengthy 30-year-old clip of economist Milton Friedman telling Phil Donahue that greed is good. Then it's back to Sherm to conclude -- and this is all he says before it's time for Yesterday's Weather Forecast Today -- "Well, here we are pondering these same issues in 2009." Sure we are if you're the R-J's editorial board and you believe any advocacy whatsoever on behalf of government intervention in a devastated economy is the equivalent of giving up altogether on capitalism. To the rational people, though, these matters are a little less black and white.

Mostly, though, I'm horrified by what this actually shows us. RJTV is not intended to inform, it is intended to become a soap box for a vainglorious newspaper publisher! Next week, maybe he'll condescend to explain why murder is bad, no matter what that growing legion of pro-murder activists say!

Evidently there just isn't enough news to smear all over ol' Nate's face.