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.

Sahara's Short, Humdrum, Dry-Eyed Goodbye

On Friday night, I emailed my Las Vegas Weekly editors my idea for my next column, which I proposed to be a look at how little emotion has been stirred up by Monday's closure of the venerable Sahara.

Then, today as I read the Sun and Review-Journal's somewhat perfunctory coverage in the newspaper of this seemingly momentous event, I realized that's not really going to be much of an original thought by Thursday when the next issue of the magazine comes out. In fact, it's a measure of how little anyone seems to really care that it won't even worthwhile to meditate on why very few people seem to really care.

I do have a theory though: Old Vegas nostalgia is mostly just talk.

In fact, I suspect the last great moment for the Sahara already happened on Friday when they handed out free tickets and then drew from a drum the names of 63 people who each received $500 that was left over in the casino's progressive slot jackpot. Well, the 63rd winner actually got $507, but whatever. Here's my losing ticket:


...and the drum...


...and the last time this casino will be quite this packed, including on Monday afternoon.


There were very few nostalgists there, just lots of people who heard they had a shot at some free money and better-than-usual odds. Even our waitress at the NASCAR Cafe seemed dispassionate, although she also has a job at the Pink Taco at the Hard Rock waiting for her at least through the summer.

The newspapers felt similarly on auto-pilot, with Norm Clarke documenting the usual recollections of famous Sahara guests and performers and Howard Stutz giving voice to the obligatory longtime employee. But then there also was Stutz visiting with ex-owner Paul Lowden who isn't sorry to see it close and Mike Weatherford being uncharacteristically tart and snarky with this:

If the 860 seats from that theater are put up for sale, I recommend those from the balcony, which have never been touched by a butt.

Ouch. Over at the Sun, all we got in print on this Closing Eve Sunday was publisher Brian Greenspun offering some choice memories and then bemoaning the place's decline. He concluded:

I have missed the Sahara for a very long time.

What strikes me here, though, is how often I hear people whine about missing the Old Vegas and the classic haunts, blah blah blah. Here we have a pretty gen-u-ine Old Vegas article, and it's going bye-bye with a great big collective shrug. Not a single podcast listener or blog reader said they were making a special trip for one last drop-in, as many did for the Stardust and a few did for the Frontier.

What's more, unlike other demises -- the Aladdin, Stardust, Frontier, Dunes and Sands among them -- there's no actual plan for replacing the place. Very few take Sam Nazarian's recent blather that something new will replace it by 2014 seriously. Both Greenspun and Lowden reference this closure as a necessary passage to some sort of "progress," but nobody actually thinks that there's anything to rise in its place before, say, Lake Mead runs out of water.

On Friday night, we went over to see this weird cash giveaway thing. Just before that was over, Twitter follower Kara70 asked me: "Will you stick around after the drawings? Do you think there'll be a stampede out the doors afterwards?"

If there was any sincere regret over the Sahara's demise, people would've stuck around after the drawing ended around 7:30 pm. They would have soaked in the lore, appreciated the waning hours. And yet...


...they didn't.

Monday Is Pulitzer Day!

Somewhere around noon PT on Monday, we find out if the Sun has done the improbable and won its second Pulitzer Prize in three years. Last time out, it was a surprise even to the reporter, Alexandra Berzon, who did it. This time, as I've been chronicling for months now, the "Do No Harm: Hospital Care in Las Vegas" series picked up two of the biggest pre-Pulitzer honors, Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and Best of Show at the National Headliners Awards in Atlantic City.

So it'll be interesting to see what happens tomorrow, and you can find out here once it's out. Landing just one is super-impressive, but nabbing two in three years for a small entity like the Sun would be absolutely amazing. And all I know is that the health series by led by Marshall Allen and Alex Richards is in the mix. I've no idea if Jon Ralston's work as columnist is in contention -- his work in the Reid-Angle and Ensign matters would absolutely be worthy if he were at the New York Times or similar -- or Mike Smith, the cartoonist who has gone far too long without proper national recognition.

Anyhow, here's the list of those who may by this time tomorrow be able to claim a Pulitzer to their credit:


Good luck to all. Make Vegas journalism proud.

BREAKING: The Sun Rises On Awesome New Site

Disclosure: I write a column for the Las Vegas Weekly and contribute regularly to Vegas Magazine, both of which are owned by the Las Vegas Sun's parent company, Greenspun Media Group.

You all know how unacceptable I find the Review-Journal's Web site. It's a disaster of epic proportions, with little indication of what editors find important and an offensive lag time on posting breaking news or updating it. It does a terrific disservice to the journalists working there and the fact that I've heard the editors don't "believe" in blogging reporters is especially backward. There's no way to focus on anything in particular, the stories are listed in no particular order and its functionality is modest. This is what the hot mess looked looks like today:

So it is with a terrific amount of glee that I observe the launch about 40 minutes ago of the new Las Vegas Sun site. Here is the debut screenshot:


Beautiful! It's clearly the hard work of a team of both JOURNALISTS and WEB DESIGNERS who figured out comfortable, visually pleasing fonts, logical navigation and an excellent framework for a promised expansion into more multimedia projects, blogs and the like. And I'm especially heartened by this line from the notice about the new site:

Constant updates. You’ll want to bookmark this site and come back several times a day. Sun writers will provide online-only breaking news in blogs ...

Sounds like they "get" it. Does anyone feel they've got to check the R-J site "several times a day"? Why, so you can find out what sort of "breaking news" the Runnin' Rebels have caused with their basketball scores?

Clearly there's more work to be done -- this letter promises that some video will be viewable on iPods but I can't find any podcast RSS feeds, and the heading for MULTIMEDIA is misspelled here. (Sorry, fellas - the site DOES say to point out mistakes!)


But even on this, the site is so much better than the R-J. The Most-Popular functions are, uh, the most popular functions on news sites because people like to know what other people find interesting. But while the Sun has this function on every single page, the R-J does not show theirs on the front page and you have to click on this tiny little "Most Popular" thing on other pages to get to a pop-up that looks like this:

For a long time, I've wondered about the accuracy of the R-J's Most Popular list, too, and what you see here is a case in point. Today's pop-up claims the most popular story of the whole MONTH is a piece from yesterday about Lake Las Vegas properties being sold. There's a major presidential primary in Nevada, the R-J coverage of which has been excellent, and folks around the world must be FLOODING both Vegas papers' sites with new traffic. So the sale of an off-Strip property is the most interesting thing they've got going? Really?

I haven't the time to dig much deeper right now, but on the surface it looks pretty nice. This is the sort of foresight that explains why I conclude in my Las Vegas Weekly column this week that the Greenspuns are my pick for the most powerful Nevadans. It's because more than anyone else, they understand the Internet, and that makes their media operations far more influential, global and powerful than what the other guys are doing. Others have similar civic, financial and political clout, but their media clout is what sets them apart. And the media these days is nothing if not digital.

In any event, congrats are in order. I encourage you all to take a gander and tell me what you find. Oh, and if you click on the screen shots, you can see what my bookmarks are. Yes, that's the Joy of Baking. Ha!

Prose Unbecoming a Publisher

There were some very interesting pieces in today's Sunday paper, my favorite being a fun feature by the Review-Journal's Henry Brean on movies set at the Hoover Dam and creepy ones from the AP about a machine being taught to beat people at poker and the trend toward companies and hospitals putting microchips in humans to track them for various reasons. I even learned in Sports today that there's a BoSox centerfielder named Coco Crisp, which made me giggle.

Still, the thing that got me was that, just when we thought it couldn't sink any lower, the feud between the publishers of the Review-Journal and the Sun sank to new depths when R-J publisher Sherm Frederick delved into mastubatory allegories unbecoming a family newspaper. To wit, he wrote:

On a related note, I had to smile at the weekly "I hate Sherm" column by my steamed colleague Brian Greenspun over at the Sun. As usual, his taunts are sophomoric, boring and a chore to read.

For those who try, I have a story (which is absolutely true) that may help.

It's about a monkey I once saw as a kid in my neighborhood pet shop.

This little monkey had a problem with ... well ... let's just say as politely as possible that the little guy had a penchant for engaging in repeated acts of self-gratification.

When unsuspecting customers wandered near the monkey's cage, he would squeak in anger, pull a blanket over his lap and then furiously continue on as if no one could see what he was doing.

That's Brian Greenspun in a nutshell. When he is caught in his journalistic acts of self indulgence, Brian angrily squeaks and pulls a blanket over his figurative lap. Then, he pounds away, as it were, as if people are unable to see what's really going on.

But, of course, they can.

Sigh. Insert your spank-the-monkey joke here. When are both of these kids gonna grow up? How embarrassing for both of these men, their publications and their staffs. But, I admit, endlessly amusing to the rest of us.

[Disclosure: I worked for three years at the R-J and I have written for several Greenspun and Stephens Media publications.]