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.

The Vegas Alt-Weekly Gay Problem

You expect alternative weeklies, thriving as they do among left-of-center political aficionados, to be havens for gay readers. It's the last place I expect to find antiquated language, stale information or overlooked yet obvious story angles.

I wasn't going to even say anything after I saw a piece in this week's Las Vegas CityLife by Jason Whited in which he conducted a Q-and-A with Mark Ciavola who has formed a conservative gay group called Right Pride. Whited uses the term "gay lifestyle" not once but twice even though the stylebooks of the Associated Press, New York Times and Washington Post all expressly say not to do so. (It's inaccurate, see, because there is no one "Gay" Lifestyle same as there's no one "straight" or "Jewish" lifestyle.) I planned to give Whited a pass on his clunky terminology because he's more pro-marriage equality than Ciavola so it seemed nit-picky to bitch.

But then, after glancing at Steve Sebelius' attempt to write a piece on The District similar but much less entertaining than the Las Vegas Weekly cover that Rick Lax did in September on Town Center, I arrived at Amy Kingsley's piece about Vegas country-western bars.

The piece seemed to have been written to serve a catchy (although actually cliche) headline, "Beers, steers and queers." And here's the strange queers part:

Anything as macho and all-American as cowboy culture runs the risk of becoming kitsch. And that's exactly the approach of Charlie's Las Vegas, a western-themed gay bar in an industrial district near The Orleans. Unlike its pearl snap buttoned-down counterparts on the outskirts, Charlie's plays its country influences for laughs, with frequent appearances by a drag queen Dolly Parton.

Charlie's has the same cheap drinks, dance floor and line dancing as other country bars, plus better looking bartenders. And the people here are very friendly. You get a little flash with your country bar experience, including a boot-shaped disco ball, but it's nowhere near as over-the-top as Revolver. And there's very little chance you'll ever run into Roger Hedgecock or the Tea Party Express. Unless, of course, they make new members out of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig or former pastor Ted Haggard.

Gosh, it almost sounds like Kingsley went there for her assignment, doesn't it? And again, the writer is clearly in our court philosophically. Just one problem: The drag Dolly Parton hasn't appeared in "well over a year," according to Boan, manager at Charlie's.

Moreover, the reason why this passage struck me is that the Charlie's I remember -- it was called Backstreet back when I was single and living a different Gay Lifestyle, see -- wasn't some cheap facsimile of a CW bar. It was the genuine article, only for gays. "We're absolutely a real country bar," Boan said.

Kingsley, like Whited, seemed to think there was one sort of gay, the kitschy, fey sort; hence The Gay Lifestyle. Gay CW bars -- and there are many all over the U.S. and even a national line-dancing tournament -- usually dispell this notion. The clientele are typically rougher, hairier and sometimes paunchier. They may enjoy a little drag with their beer or bingo, but this crowd is unlikely to be the show-tunes-obsessed, diva-idolizing sort who show up in costume for Cher concerts.

Folks who hang out at Charlie's don't do so because they're paying homage to country-western bars, they do it because they love the scene but are afraid they'll be beaten to a pulp if they tried to dance with their partners at a mainstream one. And they're probably correct.

Meanwhile, just to show I'm an equal-opportunity whiner, I can't say I'm too impressed at the moment with my own Las Vegas Weekly colleague, Abigail Goldman, who landed an interview with America's now-retired first legal male whore. Patrick L. "Markus" Norton has left Shady Lady after having a handful of clients, heading back to the porn world he eschewed in interviews when he got this gig.

Y'see, the whole reason the brothel industry was scared of legal male prostitution was because of the potential for LEGAL FOR-HIRE GAY SEX to occur. That's the issue. If that wasn't a prospect, the other brothel people wouldn't care because they know that male prostitution for female clients is a non-starter as a business model in the middle of nowhere.

Norton shut down his earning potential, it would seem, by telling Details Magazine that his "sphincter is not for sale." Surely, then, Goldman would ask him about that, about whether he was offered money to go gay-for-pay, whether any guys came by asking for a line-up. Here's someone who is in a unique position to say what the market demand might be for legal gay brothels.

But, no. It appears she didn't ask. Too bad.

More on the CityLife-Sun Drama

The prior post drew a response from CityLife publisher Geoff Schumacher. It actually sparked another line of thought that I had overlooked to begin with. So, first, here's part of Geoff's response, which is in the comments of the other item:

Amy wrote a story about Greenspun Media Group, which recently earned national acclaim when it won a Pulitzer Prize, brought in a nationally recognized web authority, then promptly fell apart, laying off workers, losing other key players and closing various publications. It was not a story about the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which did not win a Pulitzer, did not hire a nationally recognized web authority and did not fall apart. I'm not clear on why you think this story should have been something other than what it was.

I'm sure a fine story could be written about the Review-Journal, and perhaps it will be by CityLife or some other news organization. But the news peg for this particular story was crystal clear and needn't have been something other than what it was.


So here's the thing. 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).

GMG won its Pulitzer because the Greenspuns were willing to ignore the fact that their media operations bled like Roy after a tiger bite. But Kingsley's piece suggests that all of their problems came because of bad journalistic decisions or, at least, doesn't present the whole picture of this company, its fiscal history and other explanations for its problems.

Fact is, it was largely a function of economic forces and all sorts of bad decisions far away from their newsrooms. The proof is found in how many people they retained and hired when they went from being a full-service newspaper to an eight-page insert that really, on its best days, was only 5.5 pages of original copy. That didn't make economic sense, but they kept on keeping on. The balance sheets had to have looked about as bad then as now.

Thus, if you're only going to judge GMG by their layoffs and the parts they've closed down, you need a yardstick. Is Curley the total failure you make him out to be? I'd need to know the web traffic -- AND HOW IT COMPARES TO ITS COMPETITION FOR CONTEXT -- to be able to say. If the Sun is drawing numbers even close to the R-J's, and I've heard they are despite the discredited sources Sherman Frederick uses to claim his traffic in public, then the effort hasn't been a failure in any other way than that it was unable to make money in the worst economy this city has ever seen.

Furthermore, if you're going to have experts talking about how newspapers misunderstand the challenges of doing video work, how do you not at least in passing acknowledge that this is a problem at both major publications?

Bottom line: If the economy hadn't turned so sour, the Greenspuns would've continued to shovel money into the operations. They always have. In that respect, this piece overlooks an enormous part of the story.

CityLife Drills Into Greenspun Media

So here's the problem with having both alternative weeklies owned by one of the two major media conglomerates in Las Vegas: They can't do serious, in-depth coverage of media issues without messy conflicts of interest of their own.

Amy Kingsley of Las Vegas CityLife tries this week with a lengthy piece on Greenspun Media Group, its supposedly unrewarded risks in the New Media space for the Las Vegas Sun and conflict on Corporate Circle between imported, high-priced Web guru Rob Curley and the traditional news staff. It is a good read and adds some intriguing detail to the decisions that led to the decimation of the staff that I chronicled and catalogued in December.

Kingsley is a terrific reporter -- I've personally complimented CityLife Editor Steve Sebelius for that hire in the past -- and she puts in a noble effort. But she fails because she didn't give the whole picture and she probably couldn't because, well, the whole picture could include some unflattering things about the company that pays her wages, Stephens Media. I mean, look at what's advertised directly above her story on the Web:


Awkward!

You can read the piece here and I do recommend it. One thing that accurately comes across is the blinding arrogance of Rob Curley, the Web wunderkind who took credit for revolutionizing the Internet operations of Newsweek, the Washington Post and a paper in Lawrence, Kansas. I was a cheerleader for him when he arrived but after an initial, pretty redesign, such little things like an effective search engine on LasVegasWeekly.Com and other issues made me wonder if he cared about the little things that make a site user-friendly.

Kingsley convincingly makes the case that his past successes may have been short-lived and the result of circumstances of timing and opportunity, not vision. Plus, Curley comes across as churlish with a quote like: "The only thing I love more than journalism is capitalism." From the looks of the expensive embarrassment that was 702.tv, he's failed in Vegas on both fronts.

[Aside: Curley re-tweeted today the Poynter Institute's pick-up of Kingsley's piece, which is strange given how badly he comes off in it.]

All that said, to really get where GMG is these days, you need to put it in the context of its total media ecosystem. That's an ecosystem that includes one of the most dysfunctional news websites in the nation, ReviewJournal.Com, and a main newspaper, the R-J, that has somehow lost circulation during the era of one of the biggest population growth spurts in U.S. history. If we're ready to call Curley a failure in Vegas, then first we need to know the web traffic of both papers' websites, which Kingsley does not provide. Somehow I bet if it looked good for the R-J, she would've had no trouble getting it and comparing it to the Sun.

She also has a passage in there about the Sun's failed web video efforts but doesn't bother to mention that the R-J hired ex-weatherman Nate Tannenbaum to do a laughable and technologically ridiculous daily newscast. I don't know how many plays it's getting on the LVRJ.Com site, but today's episode has been on YouTube for 21 hours and has enjoyed 4 hits. FOUR. Two of which were me looking for a good moment to shoot this screencap:


If you click on it, you'll see that the episode from two days ago has a whopping 27 plays. And here's the entire history of RJTV on YouTube:


You know what has had more hits than a month's worth of RJTV episodes? This:




One more thing. The illustrations that went with Kingsley's story were very weird. This, for instance, was for Curley:

Beyond the fact that he looks like a prison inmate, what's with the scribble in the lower right part? It looks like he's got duck's wings or something. I'm seriously wondering if artist Brian Taylor thought he was drawing Chris Cooper instead. See?

Anywho, the point is that news organizations cover one another at their credibility's own peril. Without attempting to put GMG's issues in context against the R-J's, they've left out a huge chunk of the story. Which, happily, is why we have blogs.

[DISCLAIMERS: I was a staff writer for the R-J from 1996-99 and have freelanced for the R-J, CityLife and the Weekly, where I have had a column for about two years. Also, I wrote this week's cover story for the Weekly, which means Kingsley and I were head-to-head as cover writers this go-round.]