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.

Review-Journal Fires Cartoonist, Online Guy, Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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