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."

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?

Review-Journal Plans To Charge For App

A couple weeks ago, I chatted with the new Review-Journal editor, Michael Hengel, who in December took over following the ousters of both the paper's longtime editor and publisher. I just posted a slightly trimmed, 18-minute version of that discussion in the podcast feed, and you can hear it by clicking here. Also, you can right-click here to download it and listen whenever you wish.

The headline from the interview, however, was that sometime in the next few weeks, the R-J will unveil a smart-phone app that, Hengel said, they expect to charge for in some manner.

Here's that exchange, which started after I noted to Hengel that my reporting showed that one of the things he was known for at the Pine Bluff newspaper was instituting a paywall, meaning readers had to pay for access to some or all of the news content:

Friess: Are you looking at a paywall for the Review-Journal?
Hengel: Not on the website.
Friess: Ok…
Hengel: First of all, you’ve got to understand, and I think you do, it’s not just my decision on something like that. It’s primarily not my decision. But some of the things being considered are everything mobile, everything other than what you see on the website may at some point have some pay element to that. Right now it’s all fluid.
Friess: When you say everything other than the website, what are you referring to?
Hengel: Like mobile, an app, an iPad, an Android, a Kindle, phones…
Friess: You don’t see anywhere where the R-J will have a paywall similar to what The New York Times just started?
Hengel: I wouldn’t go so far as to say never, but I don’t see that in the immediate future, no. We’re not talking about that right now.
Friess: The Las Vegas Sun already has a mobile version of their website. If you look up their site on an iPhone, you get their mobile site. You don’t do that with the R-J site. Will that be coming?
Hengel: Yes.
Friess: When?
Hengel: Real soon. Within weeks.
Friess: What about an app?
Hengel: Yes.
Friess: Is it already in development?
Hengel: Yes.
Friess: And when will we see that?
Hengel: That’s also the same time. We don’t have a date, but it will be within weeks.
Friess: What will the app be? What will we get on it? And if you’re a home subscriber, do you get it for free? Is there any deal for that?
Hengel: Well, I can’t answer that right now. I’m sure there’s going to be some cost, I don’t know whether the cost will be for the app itself or for the app and some kind of subscription. That hasn’t been decided. But under consideration, Steve, is the fact that we’ll charge for some of those.
Friess: Will you charge for the mobile version of the website or just the app? They’re two different things.
Hengel: I know. They’re similar. They’ll look a lot the same, but… I’m not trying to dodge you, I just don’t know.
Friess: Are there newspaper applications you’ve looked at that are models for what they R-J’s one would be?
Hengel: Yeah.
Friess: Which one?
Hengel: The Associated Press.
Friess: They have an app people pay for?
Hengel: No. But that’s the look and the feel. Made by the same company.

So, obviously, the next thing I did was download the AP's free app and it's actually pretty awesome. But I do wonder how practical it is for the R-J to charge for a mobile app that does much the same thing when the AP's also has a "LOCAL" tab that then lists all of the R-J's stories, too. See?


Can they tell the AP to kill the Vegas section of their app? That would kind of ruin some of the charm and convenience of the AP's app, which I've grown to love since Hengel pointed me to it.

Clearly, they're still figuring this out, as the entire news industry is. It's just so great that they're finally on the case, anyhow. At a luncheon speech I attended two days before our interview, Hengel spoke smartly about the importance of being mobile, citing data that indicated half of all news consumed online came from referral via social media. He gets it.

While we're on this topic, though, I have to say that the crack Web staff at the Sun is bafflingly absent on this. Yeah, there's already a mobile version of the website, but where's the Sun app?!? So far as I can see, the only app Greenspun Media Group has put out there is the Las Vegas Weekly's, and it contains absolutely no news content from the magazine or site. Really, it should just be called the Vegas.Com app, since it's a city guide, not anything relevant to the Weekly as a publication. My editor, Sarah Feldberg, is awful cute in this explainer video, though it's ironically only available in iPhone-hated Flash:




See what I just did there? I took their video and presented it to you here. But I can't do that with any of the video on the R-J's website, and Hengel unfortunately doesn't think that's a problem. I noted to him that I can't download it or subscribe to it or embed it or any of the other means we are all accustomed to consuming and sharing such material. "We don’t have any changes planned for video," he answered.

Then there was this:

Friess: How much longer are you going to have Nate Tannenbaum doing that daily thing that he does?
Hengel: I have no plans to change anything.
Friess: Is it popular? Do people look at it?
Hengel: Yeah.


So I went back to take a look and, you know, it's a much-improved product. It's certainly a smoother, more sophisticated production and there's a lot less of staring a Nate and his see-through dress shirts. (Sorry! Nothing happens when you click above. See the problem?)

But I still don't get it. These videos are teasers to what's coming in the newspaper the next day, right? Wouldn't it make sense to allow people to get it as a podcast or to find it in places other than the R-J website? If you're watching it on the site, you're already, umm, on the site and you've already seen the headlines. It's not like they're putting links to the stories discussed within some vicinity of the video. The entire enterprise is mystifying.

There's much more in my Hengel interview, which you can hear for yourself as I mentioned. We talked about the albatross he bears trying to convince the community that the paper's news coverage is not tainted by right-wing bias, his perspective on the odd Sun-RJ relationship, how he reacts to all of the Pulitzer talk surrounding the competition. (This interview was done three days before the Sun was a Pulitzer finalist, so I was asking in order to have some comments in my back pocket in case the Sun won.)

Just one last nugget, though. I noted to Hengel that since he and Brown took over, there's been a notable and welcome absence of petty personal attacks going back and forth between the R-J and the Sun and others. I also noted that neither he nor Brown had taken a column, as Frederick and Mitchell had. His response:

If you’re going to write, you’ve got to do some reporting. If you’re going to be a columnist, you’ve got to do some reporting. There aren't very many columnists who can just offer opinions and be really compelling. So if you’re not going to do any reporting, that’s what you’re left with.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

* * *

One final amusing and tangentially related note. This is the info on iTunes for the AP's news app.

I love that! "Rated 9+ for "Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence." This is an app that presents news, photos and videos about wars, disasters, the most horrific crimes. Something tells me the violence is somewhat more than "infrequent" and "mild." As for being "realistic," I've always thought reality was about as realistic as you can get, but what do I know?

The First Words On The New R-J Editor

Could a pay wall be in the offing for the Las Vegas Review-Journal's website?

I have no idea if there are any such plans, but that is the most notable Web-related innovation that incoming R-J Editor Michael Hengel has to his credit as editor and publisher of the Pine Bluff, Ark., Commercial. That ought to make a lot of Vegas cheapskates a little antsy.

I held off on writing about the new editor, announced in yet another news dump by Stephens brass on the day before Thanksgiving, because I wanted a chance to actually, you know, learn something about him. And so I did some checking. He starts on Dec. 6.

As it happens, there's good news and bad news.

The bad news is aforementioned. According to Pine Bluff Commercial managing editor Scott Loftis, Hengel "has some deep convictions about what the future of newspapers is and where the business is going." The Commercial recently put its content behind a pay wall -- it's free for print subscribers, $11 a month for non-subscribers -- so that gives us a fairly good idea of where Hengel thinks it's all going. And he may be right, seeing how other publications are going this route, but that's generally hit this sort of discouraging news -- or encouraging if you're part of the Internet-Must-Be-Free sector.

It's unclear whether a paywall for the R-J would even work with the Las Vegas Sun sitting out there happy to poach the eyeballs that turn away. The Pine Bluff paper has no competition, so far as I can gather, not even from TV stations since it is in the Little Rock regional market. Also, the R-J's site itself would need some dramatic improvements to make it even worth paying for, and the Pine Bluff paper's website is even more primitive so it's unclear Hengel has that in his DNA.

So what's the good news?

For one thing, Mr. Hengel is exceptionally well-liked. Loftis said: "I've been in the journalism business for 22 or 23 years. This is the best boss I’ve ever had. He’s very fair, he’s very respectful. He can make a tough decision when he has to. This guy’s awesome."

OK, so this comes from a guy who still works for him and maybe is being political, although he really seemed earnest and sincere. Sadly, the Pine Bluff paper is fairly small in every way -- 12,000 circulation, four full-time reporters -- so it's not like the sieve that is the R-J, where there's always a few folks willing to gossip off-record.

But what the public in Vegas really wants to know is whether Hengel will arrive with a political or philosophical axe to grind. Former editor Thomas Mitchell, of course, joined obsessive ex-publisher Sherm Frederick in an open jeremiad against Harry Reid, inserting himself into the dynamic of the U.S. Senate race in a way that made his reporters' coverage appear tainted whether it was or not.

What about Hengel? Check out this exchange:

Friess: What do you know about Mike's political views?

Loftis: Nothing, which I think is as it should be.

Friess: Really?

Loftis: I really don’t. Mike has not indicated to me even that he leans one way or the other politically. I haven’t seen any decisions made that would reflect that, either. And I think that’s the way it ought to be.

Well, dang, so do I. An editor who isn't interested in personally being part of the political conversation? What a novel idea!

Another positive bit of news: Hengel understands issues of race. He has to, given that Pine Bluff is majority African-American. There are black city and features editors as well as a black staff writer. Could it be that he's a man who believes his staff ought to reflect the demographics his publication serves? One can hope. I suspect he'll be utterly blinded by how white his new newsroom is, especially given the rapidly changing demographics of Las Vegas.

So far, there are reasons to be optimistic. Hengel kindly wrote back to me via email to postpone an interview with me until he gets his "feet on the ground in Las Vegas." I look forward to it.

"It’s a home run for them," Loftis said. "I know he’s coming from a smaller paper, but this guy is the best I’ve ever been around."

Great. That's a start.

This week's LVW Col: The R-J's troubling future

So I thought about the changes at the R-J for a few days and here's my post-game analysis for the Las Vegas Weekly. Read on! -sf

Why the sudden changes at the Review-Journal
may be a very, very bad thing

By STEVE FRIESS

The more I think about it, the more I worry.

Like many in Las Vegas, my first reaction to the sudden dismissals Friday of Sherm Frederick as publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Thomas Mitchell as R-J editor was to smile. The two had failed the newspaper and the community in spectacular ways for years, Sherm by becoming an arrogant, obsessive enemy of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Mitchell by being so openly hostile to all things related to the Internet.

But it’s not as simple as that, is it? The actual changes that were made could, in fact, harm Nevada journalism even more than leaving these ineffective, visionless men in their places.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

The R-J's "Successes" Enumerated

I'm in the midst of a debate with a journalist friend who finds it ridiculous that the mighty Stephens clan would bother sucking up to the most powerful senator in America after the largest newspaper they own went on a years-long jeremiad to get him fired. What a crazy idea, huh?

Well, I've listed the other possibilities. But click on this to read it more easily:

That's a scan of a full-page ad the R-J has been running for a few weeks. If these things were true, then the Frederick-Mitchell tenure at the newspaper would not possibly be viewed as anything other than an unmitigated success. It claims the ReviewJournal.Com enjoys the biggest monthly uniques and pageviews, that the paper is read by 720,000 different people a week, that their total monthly online and print audience is more than 3.25 million people. There's been very robust increased web traffic, according to this, to several different R-J-related web properties.

They use the phrase "No one else comes close" after every claim. ("No one can do more" was already taken.)

Perhaps the claims in the ad are suspect -- I understand that part of the R-J's readership spike comes from links from the Drudge Report, which means a huge portion of the audience of is of absolutely no interest to local advertisers anyway -- or there are other things going on here.

More On The Review-Journal's Housecleaning

I'm hearing burblings that Sherman Frederick and Thomas Mitchell will be spinning that Reid victory was not the coup de grace that ended their regime. I'm fairly confident -- and have sources that have provided some proof -- that it played a pretty big part, but the trouble with any spin whatsoever is that the other alternatives at least as equally if not more professionally bad.

You see, Sherm may be leaving because of his health issues, but that doesn't explain Mitchell's reassignment or the sacking of the GM, Allan Fleming. That's a wholesale housecleaning and it was prompted by something. So, if they weren't sacrificed on that altar, what other choices are there?

* Revenues aren't satisfactory.

* Circulation isn't satisfactory.

* The news product isn't satisfactory.

* The Internet presence isn't satisfactory.

* The image of the company isn't satisfactory.

Pick one, boys!

I find it very doubtful the Righthaven lawsuits issue played into this. Mitchell had nothing to do with that, but he did certainly participate in the Reid-bashing and could be seen as having caused many of the above-listed possibilities. Steve Stern of Stern & Co., which is the subject of one of the Righthaven lawsuits, has a different take, but I think he's engaging in some wishful thinking.

There's just a lot that's weird about all of this, most notably the fairly shoddy way Frederick, Mitchell and Fleming are treated in the R-J story that announces the changes. It opens:

The Las Vegas Review-Journal today named a new publisher to replace longtime publisher Sherman Frederick.

Huh. We didn't even know he needed replacing! The guy's been publisher for, well, we don't really know from the story. He's also a major public figure. If this was a mutually happy parting, the lead would have cast Frederick as the main character. You know, like:

Stephens Media CEO and Review-Journal publisher Sherman Frederick retired today, leaving behind a tenure [insert most important legacy, if any, here.]

The fact that Mitchell's reassignment was held to the last paragraph is just amazing and really, really insulting to him. His own newspaper now thinks of his tenure as an afterthought. And, again, there's no standard-issue biographical information on his tenure, not a thumbnail of his career or a quote about his accomplishments or even his age.

And Fleming? Not even worth a digital inch. After all this time. Awkward!

Oh, by the way, it's been pointed out to me that the comments section for the R-J story has been closed and comments already left -- some mourned Sherm and Mitch's removals -- were removed. So they don't even want the public to be able to express their support for the men who led this enterprise for all those years. That's just cold.

Review-Journal Publisher, Editor AND GM Are Out

News just broke that R-J publisher Sherm Frederick is stepping down as publisher of the newspaper and as CEO of Stephens Media and Thomas Mitchell is out as editor. And yet, there's even more to it than that.

Not in their story? Allan B. Fleming, the Review-Journal's general manager, is also out. And Mitchell is getting a new gig created for him, some sort of senior editorial page editor role.

The article published by the R-J announcing this posits that Sherm is leaving for health reasons, and he certainly has had a rough year with surgeries for prostate and heart ailments this summer.

But the real explanation of what's happening here? Harry Reid won.

An extremely knowledgable source at the paper called this move a "shakeout" and a "head slap" from the top, meaning the owners back in Arkansas. He reminded me that the Stephens family are big Washington D.C. players, with banking interests and other issues to deal with in Congress. They may have supported Republican candidates, but the over-the-top efforts by Sherm Frederick and Thomas Mitchell to support Sharron Angle and unrelentingly beat up on the Senate Majority Leader was exceptional. It was nasty and personal and harmed the reporters' ability to have their work taken credibly, but even more importantly, if the Stephens clan wanted to make nice with Harry Reid, the only way to do it was to get rid of Frederick and Mitchell.

It's entertaining that the newspaper tried to soft-pedal this news, leaving out the Fleming angle and reducing to the very last paragraph the fact that Mitchell was also departing from his role. Those are the clues that this is a much bigger change than just an ailing publisher choosing to reduce his stress load.

Two of the announced changes, though, look like Titanic deck chair shuffling. The company's chief operating officer Michael Ferguson ascends CEO of Stephens Media and advertising director Bob Brown will be publisher of the R-J. Brown has no significant journalism experience, and what this paper needs is someone in control of the purse who understands why they need more reporters and more resources. I fear an ad guy won't have that sensibility.

Still, there is one huge reason to be encouraged: They're going out looking for a replacement for Mitchell as editor. That means that for the first time in a couple of decades, that newsroom's leadership will have some serious new energy and ideas.

The stagnation has been crippling. If Stephens is courageous, they will bring in someone young and sharp from the outside who understands (or at least doesn't openly despise) the Internet, who can give that rudderless features section a solid redo, who can advocate for more resources so reporters can spend more time digging into important stories.

Plenty of questions left:

* Will Sherm, who will retain his Sunday column, keep up the feud with the Greenspuns and the Sun, or is there a chance for a little class and maturity to break out in Vegas newspaperland?

* Will the dramatic efforts to sue to protect copyrights continue via Righthaven?

* What becomes of "Director of Visuals" Al Gibes, City Editor Mary Hynes, Features Editor Frank Fertado and Managing Editor Charlie Zobell, all of whom have been in their posts for unusually long stints?

* If Mitchell had been outright fired, would he have filed for welfare unemployment benefits?

R-J's Angle Suit Tops Top Journalism Blog

OK, so the headline above is a little off, as the R-J hasn't endorsed the Republican candidate ... yet. But Jim Romenesko of the Poynter Institute, the world's original media-watching blogger, prominently highlighted this morning my PoliticsDaily.Com piece posted over the weekend that raises three critical questions for the Review-Journal and Nevada politicians going forward now that the R-J front company Righthaven LLC has taken the unprecedented step of suing (for anything) a major-party candidate in the heart of an election season:

* Must Nevada's largest paper now include a passage in every news story it does on Angle's race against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid acknowledging that its owners have sued her?

* Can the R-J, whose publisher and editor have been outspoken supporters of the Tea Party darling, actually endorse her for Senate after having publicly accused her of stealing from them?

* Will they sue candidates who reproduce their endorsements in other races, long a de rigueur campaign practice?

My favorite part of the piece is UNLV J-School prof Mary Hausch on how exactly Shermy Sherm & The Funky Bunch will address the lawsuit in their forthcoming endorsement of Angle: "I guess they could say, 'We think she's a thief, but we like her a lot.' "

Let's see how long Editor Tom Mitchell and Sherm Frederick can duck the journalistic questions herein, if they can sober up long enough to remember that that's what their enterprise is actually supposed to be about. What I'd love is for Brooke Gladstone or Bob Garfield to cross-examine them on NPR's "On The Media." More than likely, the Bonanza Road bosses are much too craven to subject themselves to that or will squawk about "pending litigation" or, best option yet, turn it over to their journalistically clueless PR disaster, Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson. (Gibson didn't appear on Dave Berns' Nevada Today talk show on KUNV on Thursday, claiming he was tired of talking about this in the media.)

By the way, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has removed its R-J stories from its site since I made mention of it here on Sept. 3. And Steve Green of the Sun reports today two more entities settled confidentially, including the prominent blog Sweetness & Light. S&L owner Steven Gilbert -- goodness there are too many Steve/ns involved in this story, although not the thin-skinned one who prizes himself as a (cough) crack TV investigative journo and editor of a (cough) muckraking (cough) alt-weekly -- offered up this:

When a reader asked Gilbert, "What’s to keep them from tapping you again and again?," Gilbert wrote: "I have blocked all of their current holdings from my various browsers and they are blacklisted on S&L. I would advise anyone with an Internet site to do the same."

Can someone explain to me technically how that would work? Does this mean that R-J reporters at work can't access that website? And does this really and truly mean that the R-J has sued itself altogether out of view of one of the Web's largest conservative audiences?

Will the R-J Sue Sharron Angle?

Now the fun starts.

As you may know, the Review-Journal has turned over copyrights on its articles to Righthaven LLC to sue dozens of websites and organizations for damages for reposting entire or large swaths of R-J stories. I have supported this effort as an innovative approach to protecting media copyrights, writing a Las Vegas Weekly column and appearing on KNPR to defend the practice.

That doesn't mean I mind watching publisher Sherm Frederick and editor Thomas Mitchell -- both full-throated Sharron Angle supporters and Ahab-like Harry Reid haters on an order unbecoming people who wish their newspaper's coverage to be respected -- wander into a political pickle.

Y'see, based on their own statements and those of Righthaven chief Steven Gibson, they now have absolutely no choice. They must sue Sharron Angle. For damages.

Check this out.


The Angle campaign today posted 845 of the 1,651 words in Laura Myers' Sunday story. That's more than half of it. It would be fun to see how many readers on SharronAngle.Com were so compelled by this brilliant piece to hop over to the full article; I'm betting not many.

But wait, there's more!

The campaign posted the entirety of an August 13 piece in the R-J about new poll results...


...and an Aug. 9 Glenn Cook column on the campaign...


...and an Aug. 6 editorial about the race...


...and on and on. There are several more examples, dating all the way back to a June 9 story about her primary win, see?


I post all these screenshots to help the Righthaven folks in their litigation, seeing how the Angle folks may soon pull all of this down after this post appears. That really doesn't matter to Righthaven's stated modus operandi, though; thousands of readers have seen these stories on SharronAngle.Com and not ReviewJournal.Com; that's a clear loss of the eyeballs that translate into advertising revenue.

The Righthaven approach is to sue first, ask questions later and Gibson has been proud of not taking an ideological slant in which sites they attack. This means even if Angle takes these down, they still must sue her and pursue damages. And the lawsuit has fascinating potential: They could subpoena the web traffic data for a major political candidate's site, something I don't believe journalists have ever been privy to. C'mon, Thomas "Open Records" Mitchell! You can get that for us!

What Righthaven cannot do is send a friendly, "Hey, that ain't cool, take it down" note because they've established that they don't do that. And, again, I'm OK with that. Scare the crap out of 'em, even the cat blogger. You're hard-core badass. Don't soften up now!

By the way, when I first inquired about the R-J's policy earlier this year as the lawsuits began landing, I was told I would remain in bounds with the R-J policy if I used the material under "fair use" -- that is, I was excerpting pieces for legitimate commentary -- or if I provided a headline and the first paragraph or two of a story, with a link.

You know, like this:


Angle's campaign has done neither and has been flouting the R-J's copyrights for more than two months now.

Righthaven must sue. It took effort to find the cat blogger, but this one was on a major candidate's site, there in plain sight. If they don't sue Angle, they provide dozens of infringers with a clear example of the company's inconsistency in defending its copyright. And there goes the whole enterprise, right there.

A Guvmint Handout The R-J Loves

Rarely is there a day when the editorialists at the Las Vegas Review-Journal do not peer out at an unjust world through their extreme-libertarian lenses and find some form of government spending to bash as unnecessary or excessive or a result of our ever-expanding Nanny State.

And then, this morning on my driveway, I received the fruit of the R-J's very own guvmint handout: a 36-section, 576-page, 9-pound stack of newsprint that went almost directly into my recycling bin. Almost, of course, because I had to take a moment to look more carefully on your behalf at the sort of pocket-lining Socialism that Sherm Frederick, Tom Mitchell and the rest of the Bonanza Road gang are A-OK with.

What is it? Well, that's a printed list of every property and property owner in Clark County and their tax assessment. They do it every year. And, yes, all of this information is readily available to anyone who wishes to find it on the Clark County Assessor's website. You can go right there and find out exactly how much my house isn't worth these days. Knock yourself out.

No, no. You won't see anyone over there bitching and moaning about the $555,000+ waste of Clark County taxpayer dollars mandated by a 100-year-old state law. Nor will you see any reporting in the paper about how a change to that law to end this direct deposit into the local newspaper's accounts passed both houses of the Nevada Legislature in 2009 only to be vetoed by Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons. Strange that the R-J didn't rail viciously against the smaller-government-loving Gibbers keeping in place a system that flushes $800,000 in taxpayer money across the state down the toilet. How many teachers could we hire with that dough?

Keep in mind, this is a desperate state that has had to cut just about everything. The Stephens Media Subsidy, however, stayed in place. And the Legislature, which overturned Gibbons' veto a record 41 times, including to heroically grant me fake gay marriage, didn't bother with this one.

Why does the government spend all this money to print and distribute this material? For that we turn to April testimony from the Nevada Press Association, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Old Media which has in the first line of its who-are-we blather that members are "limited to newspapers qualified to publish legal notices in the state." It's their entire raison d'etre. You're not a worthy member unless you're on the take from The Man.

NPA Executive Director Barry Smith appeared before a Nevada Senate committee on April 30 to defend this silliness. According to the transcript, he repeatedly insisted that such public notices are an important service that helps keep the assessors honest and allows neighbors to detect mistakes, inadvertent or otherwise.

He also claimed that having this landfill-fill delivered is far more user-friendly than going on the assessor's website. That is actually a lie. The 576-page behemoth I received today lists everything in alphabetical order. I don't know most of my neighbors' last names and I suspect neither do you. But when I go to the Assessor's website and toss in any address, the site helpfully also lists several others before and after mine. See?



From there I can click on any of them and find out who owns it, how many bathrooms they have, what sorts of improvements they've made and so on. I can even see an aerial photo of the place. I keep pressing the paper I received today, but darn it if nothing ever seems to pop up!

Smith's performance in Carson City was the sort of thing that the R-J boys would be picking apart tasty limb by tasty limb if he weren't standing up for perpetuating their gravy train. He complains that government websites are too complicated and there are so damn many of them, so the people just can't find what they need themselves. Because, you know, the R-J is usually in the business of advocating for government intervention on behalf of helpless and deliberately clueless average Americans.

Smith also waved this "survey" the NPA took that showed that -- surprise! -- 87 percent of respondents said state and local governments should continue to publish such notices in newspapers. In his testimony, though, he admits it was not a random-sample survey which means it also has no scientific value for use in making public policy. Also, the findings make no common sense.

My favorite, though, is when Smith argues that removing the newspaper from the equation also removes "third-party accountability." I guarantee you nobody at the R-J or any other newspaper actually reviews the information they publish for the county. This is an advertiser relationship; the newspaper is in no way acting as a fact-checking entity in this mix. Another lie.

Smith is also gravely concerned that the U.S. Census in 2007 found 47 percent of households with annual incomes of less than $25,000, 45 percent of Hispanic households and 40 percent of households where people have no college education have no Internet access. He doesn't bother to note that it's pretty unlikely those people even subscribe to the newspaper and that people that poor probably don't own homes, either.

And, as an aside, just imagine if that $555,000 a year went instead to provide subsidies to help make Internet access affordable which, in turn, could be used for all sorts of great purposes as opposed to the one purpose it is presently not accomplishing! The R-J Editorial Board would oppose such a cyber-welfare effort and tell people to go to the library to log on, right? Of course.

Finally, the R-J's subscription rate is about 170,000. (Probably less, but for the sake of argument, we'll be generous.) There are 2 million people in Las Vegas. This is a penetration of 8.5 percent. According to the Senate testimony, as much as 70 percent of residents have some form of at-home Internet access. That means that by a gigantic factor, the Internet is the more effective means of providing this information.

Ass. Paul Aizley, the Democrat who tried to change the law, told that Senate committee that the 2008 assessor rolls took up 456 pages of newsprint that required 40 million pages of paper and ink in 2008. The R-J has narrowed its margins, which may explain why this year's version is 120 pages heftier, but ultimately the outcome has to be similar. It's 9 pounds of newsprint times 170,000 and that's 1.5 million pounds of paper. Yikes.

I appreciate that that $555,000 is a goodly sum for the newspaper company and I would hate to see more colleagues lose their jobs. But, you see, I take them at their word when they write ad nauseum about being self-sufficient and about shrinking government.

Where's Glenn Cook or Vin Suprynowicz when it's their own salaries at stake? If they don't stand up against such waste even when it costs them and their company personally, I'll assume they were just faking their outrage -- as most people suspect anyway -- all along.

Of Lobotomies, Heart Attacks, and Fellatio

The Sunday papers were full of long pieces about how awful the economy is and who it's hurting now, which I find depressing and redundant so I passed them by. There were three bits of interest to discuss, though:

1. Poor Employees of Tom Mitchell. There was a sadly amusing and maddeningly clueless column by blog-hating R-J Editor Tom Mitchell explaining why the newspaper business is in such dire straits. True to form, he wanted to "offer some insight into the century-old business model for the modern daily newspaper" without seeing how ridiculous and paradoxical that phrase is. He does, in fact, still cling to a 100-year-old business model for a "modern" newspaper without ever acknowledging anywhere that that very century-old business model is going out the window in the new era. He describes his company's troubles as though it is merely being buffeted by the standard-issue problems of a slow economy, never once noticing that other important societal shifts are taking place that will never be undone even when the economy improves. He also continues to deliberately play fast and loose with data, referring to a tiny recent daily-newspaper circulation uptick while never admitting the paper's circulation is about the same as it was a decade ago and that his regime failed to capitalize at all on Las Vegas' record-setting population growth.

It depresses me because Mitchell and publisher Sherm Frederick will go on insisting as they run their newspaper into the ground that they are being harmed by forced beyond their control and take comfort in the fact that other major papers are struggling, too. Yet they have a singularly hideous and anti-user website that blares as breaking news such things as first-quarter football scores, they have bloggers who don't blog, they have video programming that can't be downloaded to any portable media device and their idea for cutting edge is to have a middle-aged weatherman read the news on a smartphone. They play victim of circumstance when, in fact, they are actively incompetent at using the Internet in a meaningful way that could put them in a position to capitalize once a viable Web-based business model develops. And besides the fact that I love newspapers and good journalism and want it to persist and thrive, I mostly worry that several fine journalists will end up jobless thanks to their bosses' myopia.

2. Viva Las Vegas for heart attacks: Parade Magazine ran an excerpt from a book by ex-Good Morning America executive producer Ben Sherwood in which he claims that the best place to have a heart attack is in a casino because everyone's watching and all the security personnel are trained at defribillating and CPR and stuff like that. That makes some sense, but Sherwood doesn't explain here the source of his contention that "the heart attack survival rate in Las Vegas is 53 percent." Does he mean at Strip casinos? Or citywide? He points to Seattle (16 percent) and Chicago (2 percent) as comparisons, but there isn't really any explanation as to why away from the casino floor Vegas heart attack victims would be any better off. It sure as hell ain't because our health care system's so terrific.

3. Not Howie Do It. Howard Stutz, the usually excellent gaming reporter for the R-J, had an off-day today. He did a lengthy piece on the departure of MGM Mirage CEO Terry Lanni that was full of nothing but praise for Lanni's tenure. Besides the question as to why this is worth a look now, nearly two months after Lanni left, there is nothing anywhere in the piece that examines Lanni's role in overleveredging this company into the challenges it currently faces. In fact, the troubled condition of the company at the time of Lanni's resignation is never mentioned and instead the focus is on the non-story about Lanni's phony MBA. That's odd; Lanni himself acknowledged that it seemed like a good time to go because the problems needed fresh eyes and new ideas. What's more, while everyone in the piece -- Gary Loveman, Bill Weidner, Jim Murren, Bill Boyd, Bill Bible, Dennis Neilander, Frank Fahrenkopf -- sang Lanni's praises, a tiny bit of balance could have easily been achieved by noting that Steve Wynn has been very critical lately of Lanni and others for making deals they shouldn't have. Wynn said as much to several news outlets in the rush surrounding the opening of Encore. And Wynn's not the only one who could have provided an alternative assessment of Lanni's tenure; someone on Wall Street easily could at least have been called upon to explain why the MGM stock had tanked so dramatically in Lanni's final year. Sure, most of Lanni's career was bountiful, but most of Alan Greenspan's career was bountiful, too, and we're all now taking a second look at that as well.

This week's LVW col: The R-J's Travesty

This is something that, when I saw it, I decided it was more than a blog item. It was a serious outrage. Then some of my R-J friends started emailing asking if I'd seen this, that many inside the paper were offended by it. So here's this week's piece, vivisecting one of the most embarrassing and journalistically specious things the R-J has done in a good, long while. As for the headline, I may need to take that up with my Weekly editors. I'm the poster boy for WHHSH fatigue. Three WHHSH-inspired headlines since August is annoying. Ahh, well. Such is life. Here's the piece...

What really happens in Vegas...
Getting to the bottom of the investigation into R&R Partners and the LVCVA
BY STEVE FRIESS

If I were an investigative reporter working for one of the local daily newspapers, near the top of my list for digging would be the complex, expensive and probably unprecedented relationship between R&R Partners and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Therein lies a very incestuous web of personal and professional conflicts and galling amounts of unaccounted-for taxpayer money. Any time there’s more than $80 million being spent on one company to do something as nebulous as promoting a destination, it’s fertile ground for scandal.

So here’s what I would do if I had a big handlebar moustache and wore a 10-gallon hat and viewed myself as Nevada’s last, best hope of staving off tyranny: I’d set aside some time for my best reporters to analyze the books, file Freedom of Information Act requests, work sources and produce something substantive. You know, I’d put some resources, some money, some elbow grease into it. And I’d make sure that whatever the reporters did, it was fair and balanced.

What I wouldn’t do is repackage the propaganda of some agenda-driven “think-tank” and call it my most pressing story on a Sunday when my circulation was at its peak.

The November 30 Review-Journal piece, titled “LVCVA, ad agency defend deal,” by A.D. Hopkins was a travesty of journalism. In fact, as hard as I’ve been on my blog and elsewhere about the R-J’s silly approaches to their Internet content, I never imagined that Editor Thomas Mitchell and Publisher Sherman Frederick would allow such a piece of tripe to touch the ink-stained fingers of their dwindling legions of readers.

Read the rest HERE

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...



...is just ugly. TinyUrl.Com. Try it.

Sheldon Adelson's Response

On Sunday, the R-J published this response by Sheldon Adelson to an attack by Review-Journal Editor Thomas Mitchell and the general topic of why he continues to press his libel suit against bankrupted columnist John L. Smith.

Read it here. I'm very curious your reaction. I'll comment on it later, after I hear what y'all think.

Sunday's Papers Full of Stuff

A few fun and weird things to ponder about today's Sunday paper...

1. First and most importantly, CONGRATS to my "Petcast" co-host Emily Richmond, crowned Outstanding Journalist of the Year by the Nevada Press Association for her consistent excellence in covering the education system. Incredibly well deserved!

2. The R-J ran the above photo from John Locher run with its Sunday recap of the week's news. That's a protester flipping the bird at Dick Cheney during the veep's visit. It is incredibly weird that a family newspaper would publish a picture of someone making an obscene gesture. In fact, I've never seen such a thing before. If this were TV news, my partner tells me, the FCC would prosecute/persecute.

3. Am I the only one creeped out by this well-meaning cartoon (below) from Jim Borgman which ran on page 3D in the R-J today?

4. Terrific piece by Benjamin Spillman in today's business section about people buying fractional ownership in private jets. It's excessive, even with Spillman's anecdotal lead about the sad-sack case of a Vegas woman with a hip replacement who simply couldn't handle commercial flights anymore to fly to her second home on the Monterey Peninsula, but it did give me some story ideas nonetheless.

5. The Review-Journal's Thomas Mitchell, in touting his own staff's award-winning efforts in the same competition in which Emily won big, claims he got more than 3.3 million hits by Googling "newspapers are dead." Odd, since I just did it and I got about 9,700 hits. See my results here. Or, even better, if you Google "newspapers-are-dead" your choices plummet to 2,900. See? A search of "newspapers are dead" without the quotes around it or the hyphens does bring in more than 4 million hits, but it's an irrelevant search because Google drops the word "are" and you're getting any page that has the words newspapers and dead in any context. Seeing how newspapers write about the dead all the time, it's surprising the hit count is so low.