R-J Layoffs Yield Bizarre List of Employee Ages

So that, above, is a letter that arrived at the homes of those who were "selected for Involuntary Termination" (read: You WIN!) along with a truly bizarre attachment that I'll get to in a moment. You can click on the image above to enlarge it and read it. I've read this sentence many times and I can only conclude that someone who somehow still has a job needs a remedial writing course:

The Company is providing information to you regarding class, unit or group considerd in the selection decision to you, as well as information regarding other classes, units, or groups similarly evaluated by higher levels of management.

Yeah, beats me, too. But what comes after this is even stranger: It's a three-page list of every newsroom job and the age of the person who occupies it. There are no names, but it's not difficult to figure out who's who in many cases. Here's a couple of examples:

As you can see, I'm being very selective here. I could post the entire list with everybody's ages, but there's no need for that. The newsroom leaders, however, who expect every reporter to ask the ages of most figures in stories, cannot claim any sort of vanity or privacy in the matter.

Mostly, though, I'm trying to understand the purpose of distributing this. They're giving those who were fired a list of everybody's ages. Is this a pre-emptive legal defense against someone who might sue them on grounds they were terminated based on age? It seems really extraordinary to go this far, but I'm not a corporate lawyer and haven't had a full-time job since Clinton, so I don't know.

It was fascinating, though, and I'll do some age analysis in a moment.

But first, the document answers a few questions we've been wondering. Who, exactly, was fired in Thursday's newsroom purge? Here's that list:

So that's 12, every one of whom was on my list, so I did a complete job. My list was longer -- 22 names -- because it includes the fired from non-newsroom departments as well as a few who lost their jobs over the past week or two, too. Thus, I stand by my reporting and accept that, above, as the official count for the newsroom itself for that one day of carnage.

Again, I don't see the need to publish the ages of those fired or other those who kept their gigs. But I found some interesting data therein nonetheless.

This document indicates the newspaper now has 107 newsroom employees, although that includes four non-journalist support staff jobs. Of this, there remain 43 "reporters" or "senior reporters" across every section including their weekly publications such as CityLife and the View neighborhood sections. That's about one reporter for every 46,511 people in Las Vegas. I do not know what the national average is or the average in other cities, so I can't put that number in context.

Other tidbits:

* The average age of those who lost their jobs on Friday was 51.4.

* The oldest newsroom employee is a 69.1-year-old columnist.

* The youngest newsroom employee is 20.4-year-old photographer.

* There are five staff photographers and two photo editors left, meaning the department lost 36% of its employees and 44% of their shooters.

* The paper now has just one graphic art illustrator on staff. If that person's on vacation or out sick, I guess there are no charts or graphics in the paper?!?

* The average age of the R-J's reporters is 42.5.

* The youngest reporter is 22.3, the oldest is 63.9.

* This list indicates there are four columnists. I assume they include Norm Clarke, John L. Smith, Jane Ann Morrison and, well, I don't know. It's confusing because there are clearly more columnists, see:

I guess many of these folks -- such as Howard Stutz and Mike Weatherford -- are counted as reporters or maybe "senior reporters." And I imagine folks like Vin Suprynowicz and Sherm Frederick are freelancers or contractors of some sort with their Sunday pieces.

Anyhow, make of this what you will. On Monday, I expect to obtain the documents the fired journalists must sign to get their severance, so stay tuned. And at 9 a.m. PT, I'll be on State of Nevada on KNPR to discuss the matter.

Another Pulitzer Nod Coming For Las Vegas Sun?

Two years ago, most of Las Vegas was caught completely off guard when our little Las Vegas Sun snagged a Pulitzer Prize for public service for Ali Berzon's coverage of a rash of construction deaths at CityCenter. We weren't paying attention because the idea of a Vegas paper earning such an accolade was sort of hard to fathom. If anything, I would've expected the Sun's awesome cartoonist Mike Smith to win before anyone else. I also had thought that if Sen. John Ensign had resigned, Jon Ralston might stand a shot at a nod as a columnist.

Well, I'm not going to get caught behind the curve this go-around. For the past couple years, the Sun's crack medical writer Marshall Allen has been digging and digging and digging into all sorts of scandal involving medical errors, hospital reporting practices and the like in the Do No Harm series. Marshall, like Berzon before him, is the main journalist here but as this credits box shows, it takes a lot of people to do such important and complicated work.


Well, just like the Oscars have the SAG Awards and the Golden Globes, there are journalism equivalents and one is the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy's finalists for the 2011 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, announced Friday. So look at that, Allen and co-writer Alex Richards are among the six for that. They're up against the LA Times for its investigation of corruption in Bell, Calif.,; NPR for an expose on the nation's bail bondsman industry; ProPublica and NPR (including Ira Glass) for coverage of the economy, the Washington Post for a look at the expansion of government since 9/11; and the San Jose Mercury-News on the influence of lobbyists in Sacramento.

The nomination all but ensures that the Sun is looking at another Pulitzer contender and, frankly, just looking at the topics in contention I have to believe the odds are very good.

The Goldsmith award will be handed out at Harvard University on March 7. The winner gets $25,000. The Pulitzers are awarded in mid-April. Good luck!

My Alleged R-J Conflict Of Interest

Got this interesting note from a brave soul called "Anonymous" earlier tonight and I thought it might be worthwhile to dispose of it here as opposed to as a response in the comments section of that post. I'm sure this person is not the only one to wonder what my motivations are regarding the Review-Journal. So here's what was written:

I know you won't put this comment on your blog because you don't want others knowing that you have a chip on your shoulder when it comes to the Review Journal. You really hate the RJ for not hiring you back, don't you? Why don't you disclose this fact when you write about them? That you tried to return to the RJ after you left only they wouldn't hire you. You want to go accusing other journalists of being unethical and yet you don't follow a basic tenet of journalistic ethics, which is to disclose such conflicts. Put the information out so others can decide whether they want to stand behind your criticisms or take them with a grain of salt. You might actually earn some respect then.

There ya are, Anon. Not only will I put it on the blog but I'll make sure as many people as possible see it. Fancy that.

So, let's have at it, shall we?

I worked for the Review-Journal from 1996 to 1999, during which time I covered the education and county government beats. And when I returned to Vegas in late 2002 after stints at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and then in Beijing, China, I never, ever even considered the idea of returning to the Review-Journal. Anyone who suggests otherwise is an out-and-out liar. Not even Sherman Frederick, who has attacked me and suggested nefarious motives on his blog a while back, ever claimed my issues stem from some desire to get back into the womb. (I'll get back to why Simple Sherman thinks I am this way in a moment.)

It just never crossed my mind because I was making far too much money from far too prestigious a set of publications when I returned to Vegas in 2002.

You see, I freelanced for nearly two years in Asia for USA Today, The New York Times and some others. I only returned to Vegas in 2002 because I was hoping to make a very troubled first marriage work and my partner of nearly 10 years was a medical student here. He was only going to remain for another 18 months and then we expected to move on together to Chicago, his hometown. Getting a full-time job wouldn't have made any sense, but more importantly I wanted to keep freelancing and had the contacts to make it work immediately.

My marriage failed anyway and I ended up staying here. But by the time I realized Vegas wasn't a temporary stop for me, I was making more money and enjoyed more freedom than I thought even existed in journalism. Not to mention, after covering something like China for the largest American daily newspaper, you just can't go back to covering a local city council. Or, at least, I couldn't.

The freedom was pretty important, too. When I took off for China, I thought I was done with journalism after jobs in Rockford, Vegas and Florida. But in China I realized it wasn't journalism I disliked, it was beat reporting. When you cover the school district for a local paper and you notice an interesting trend in, say, the gaming business, they make you hand off your idea to the gaming reporter. I always wanted to do it myself and I have prided myself on being extraordinarily versatile. That's what gets me going.

More proof: In the fall of 2003, I turned down a job at the Washington Post in its Montgomery County bureau. It shocked me to do it; a staff post at one of the top dailies had always been my pre-China, pre-Vegas, post-Northwestern dream. But when the chance presented itself, I couldn't see myself as happy doing it. I was helping to set the national media agenda for Vegas; covering a suburb even for the Post seemed so mundane. Also, I'd have had to take a pay cut.

I never have or would consider reapplying to the Review-Journal, but I retain many close friends there and believe that the paper's journalists are, on the whole, excellent. In fact, my broadsides at the Review-Journal's management are largely because it angers me that the journalists they hire are never given the proper tools to reach their potentials and give this community the media it needs and deserves.

My antipathy for the R-J stems directly from the fact that their web operation is a joke that could imperil the entire enterprise in the near future and their publisher consistently makes decisions and says illogical or untrue statements that harm his credibility as well as that of his staff. Any publisher who pretends he's rabidly against big government but personally calls the governor to beg to keep his own gravy train rolling, for instance, is a hypocrite who jeopardizes his own reporters' ability to do their jobs properly.

It's hypocrisy and bad journalism that rankle me, and if you read this blog long enough you'd see I praise loads and loads of R-J stories when they deserve it. You'll also see that when I screw up, I'm pretty loud about that, too. Also, I don't think anyone can claim the Sun gets an easy ride, either, especially lately.

Now, Sherm Frederick believes I am a disgruntled former employee. He gets this because at one point on this blog, I noted that in the late 1990s, when Jon Ralston was still at the paper and starting up his daily e-mail blasts, R-J reporters were forced to contribute without any compensation. This is intuitive now -- in fact, I advocate that journalists participate in all sorts of media and I do so myself without additional pay as a regular matter of course -- but back then this seemed like an unfair burden. So, in silent protest, I would forward the email blasts to some of my sources and friends to save them the money of subscribing. I'm not proud of this, it was juvenile, shortsighted and unprofessional, but the only reason anyone even knows is because I apologized to Jon on this blog! That I remain embittered over something so ridiculous 12 years later is absurd, but a lot of what Simple Sherman writes is absurd, so whatcha gonna do?

Yet the question now becomes, where does an anonymous poster who flings baseless accusations without any evidence or even a shred of logic on his/her side get off suggesting who deserves respect and who doesn't? Agree or don't agree with me, but at least I sign my name on every last view I air, every last accusation I assert. That, it seems to me, is where respect and credibility arise. Being right and arguing a good case, too, helps.

So, no, Anonymous, you won't get another shot on this blog unless you identify yourself, even in private and off-record via email. But here's what I'll do. I'm going to put a little link up in the left rail of this blog to this very post. And so from here forward, it will be easy for people to know what my history is with the Review-Journal and decide what my conflicts, if anyone can call it that, may be. MmmK?

Is NinaGate Now DarcyGate?

Nevada' Deputy Attorney General Robert Giunta today dropped the state's lawsuit against the auto repair shop TireWorks, which was the subject of some scathing reports by KTNV's Darcy Spears. This was the case in which Spears' colleague and anchor Nina Radetich was caught on a recording recommending her boyfriend's damage-control public-relations expertise in advance of Spears' reports.

It turns out, Nina may have been something of a red herring. Giunta's statement was surprisingly blunt and a serious indictment of a suspect form of journalism in which reporters and authorities collaborate:

"The complaints against Tire Works represented only a tiny fraction of the automotive complaints received by the State and represented a miniscule number of cases relative to the total number of customers that Tire Works has served. The Consumer Affairs Division's decision to permit the news media to accompany them on the compliance checks was the reason the case was so exaggerated and received so much publicity. The net effect was that the allegations were made to appear much larger than they were."

The Consumer Affairs Division no longer exists because the Legislature killed it the last time they were scrounging around for budgetary nickels. What they had done was take a car to three different TireWorks locations and received three different repair estimates, then sued over deception. They also sold the car before TireWorks could re-examine it as evidence in the suit against them.

The case became famous because of Radetich's outrageous actions, for which there is no question she should no longer be a working journalist. But Giunta makes an important point that is more important because anchorette influence peddling is not nearly as common as what Spears did here.

TireWorks, he's saying, was simply unlucky to have been the target when the Consumer Affairs Division allowed Spears along for the ride. This, of course, is the problem with all "journalism" of this ilk, made glamorous by Chris Hansen of MSNBC. It's portrayed disproportionately just because a journalist has been given access.

Yet in retrospect, this wasn't Spears as investigative journalist. It was Spears as stenographer. She didn't do any investigatin', she just made a really, really big deal out what the investigators said they had found when she was on hand. Investigators file charges and lawsuits every day that don't lead the news; this one did because Spears had video. She didn't get anything because she's a crack reporter, she got it because, I'm betting, someone at this agency decided that a little sensationalism could bolster the case for the Legislature to not put them out of business. Any which way, it's clear now that authorities were ginning up the drama to get on the teevee.

Unsurprisingly, KTNV General Manager Jim Prather defended his staff even as they exhibit shoddy journalistic practices. No, in order to lose one's job over there, you have to be a well-liked 25-year veteran who gets a minor traffic citation that is later dropped.

[Hat tip to Mike Spadoni for the alert on this.]

Covering (Up) The Election

As you can see, the campaign managers for U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and two of the Republicans seeking to unseat him this year, Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian, were getting together to chat about media coverage of campaigns. Cool, right? Except then there's this part:


Let's see if I get this straight. The Society of Professional Journalists, protectors of press freedoms and openness, is holding an event with three major political figures and they've granted a blanket of privacy to them? And the acting dean of the UNLV journalism school is not just endorsing but presiding over this?

I'm not the only one who finds this weird and unsavory. Two of my favorite experts from the Poynter Institute, a highly regarded journalism think-tank in Florida where I've won two scholarships in my career to attend sessions, agree. Kelly McBride wrote back succinctly: "I think it's BS for such an event to be off the record." And her colleague, Bob Steele, wrote me: "I can't think of any good reason I would agree to those terms for this type of session, but I'd like to know what they mean by that term in this case, and I would like to know WHY they've agreed to such a standard."

Right. WHY. Why would these people get such a significant promise? I asked Charlie Zobell, the managing editor at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, longtime instructor at the UNLV j-school and coordinator of this event. (Disclosure: He was also my boss from 1996-99.) His response:

It is our standard practice to have all SPJ meetings "on the record." In this case, however, the panelists were convincing in their request that the discussion be off the record.

After many previous elections, we have invited political consultants and campaign managers to critique local coverage. This is the first time we have asked them to give us their views at the beginning of the election cycle. We definitely thought they would be more forthcoming and the discussion would be of greater value to us if the meeting itself were not covered as a news event.

I discussed their request with other members of our local chapter before agreeing to the arrangement. Anyone who attends is free to try to interview the panelists after the meeting.

Yeah, I figured this was the logic, that the participants "would be more forthcoming." Except what does that mean? These are seasoned political professionals. One of them is the political director for the most powerful Democrat in Congress. They're also competing. What kind of information could or would they impart? And what awkwardness is this going to create should they actually say something of value?

Try this. Suppose Harry Reid's guy says, "We know the R-J is out to get us and so we're going to only give interviews to the Sun." Wars between major politicians and major news outlets is news and if you don't believe me, see Obama v Fox. The public needs to know that! But nobody can report it? And later, when it comes to be an evident strategy, the reporters who were there are in the awful situation of still not being allowed to observe it because maybe they wouldn't have had anything more than a hunch but for the fact that the strategy was essentially confirmed at this session?

The promise of "off the record" is supposed to be very special. It's something that journalists are really only supposed to agree to when they think they might get some important information that is crucial to the public that advances a story. We usually let sources we know go there more than we should, but that's because of long-term relationships. Typically, if information provided off-record can be confirmed by other sources, it can be published but not attributed.

In this case, however, it's being used precisely in the opposite manner. It's being granted to highly trained political hands who are the savviest in the state at dealing with journalists. And whatever they say is actually supposed to be locked away in a vault.

This is very, very bad role-modeling for UNLV students. Like Steele, I find it hard to imagine what information would be imparted that would be worth this bargain. And it's terrible precedent for SPJ, which will now have to explain to future panelists why they, too, don't get the deal.

Also, as longtime UNLV journalism professor Mary Hausch noted to me today, it's unenforceable. She wonders if SPJ will make attendees sign something or swear an oath. Would a journalist organization actually forcibly remove someone who refused to agree to these terms? Can you imagine? And the rest of the "journalists" there wouldn't report THAT?

"It is highly unusual to have a meeting that is off-the-record in its entirety and, from a practical standpoint, I'm not sure how you can guarantee that to the speakers," Hausch said.

You can't. Someone can Tweet it or put it on YouTube or post it to a blog anonymously or send the information to someone unemcumbered by the promise made on their behalf, like me. Then, if it's really newsworthy, the rest of the participants will either have to cover it or be derelict reporters.

And you know who knows that better than anyone? The three political dudes who negotiated this awesome arrangement. While Zobell says that they're now being provided a space to be more candid and open, these guys know there's no such thing. They're never going to tell even a roomful of sworn-to-secrecy-journalists what they'd tell one another over drinks or what they'd advise their clients. And they're sure as sugar never going to say anything useful that their opponents' strategists can use.

That is precisely WHY these events are more useful in post-mortem and not in the thick of a developing story when participants still have so much to gain or lose. And if this is a good time to do this because it's right when it's all ramping up, then go get the strategists of the LAST election, who can be honest and sober and uncompromised.

So SPJ has given away the journalist's most precious negotiating card, set a terrible precedent for itself and set a very bad example for the students for ... nothing. That's really a shame.

* * *

P.S. It's not clear it matters anyway. The event is Saturday and all of the top political journalists in Nevada are likely to still be in Carson City covering the Nevada Legislature's special session. But even if they weren't, which one of them worth their salt would attend such an event and risk being compromised as I've described?

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.]

The Sun's Fired, An Accounting

I'm working to provide a full accounting of those fired at the Las Vegas Sun yesterday. So many have had such important careers in Vegas that someone must acknowledge that as well as explain what was lost.

Please continue to let me know and I will add them here. I also need to try to determine whether there's any sort of logic to who's left. It seems like virtually the entire sports staff is gone, for instance, and arts writers Joe Brown and Kristen Peterson have been shifted to the Las Vegas Weekly. Will the eight-page Sun now primarily be a vehicle for coverage of government?

Since many have asked me, my "The Petcast" co-host and Sun education writer Emily Richmond did survive. I'm told that photographer Sam Morris, whom I had previously listed, also is still employed.

Today, Sun publisher Brian Greenspun addressed the matter on the front page of the paper in a very strange piece. Yes, he acknowledged the economic ravages that have brought upon this moment but no, he did not publicly acknowledge the veterans whose service had ended. What's more, he tried to, like with the press release, suggest there's some good here. "It was both a hopeful and a sad moment," he wrote. Hopeful for who? He refers to his publications -- and I agree -- as "credible and responsible" content providers, except that he acknowledged no managerial errors that led to this -- there had to be some, even if they were sins of excessive journalistic ambition -- and did not specify how many people had lost their jobs.

One more thing. I don't believe for a moment that Mike Kelley, the grizzled old managing editor, happened to decide to retire recently because he feels obligated to his family as Greenspun wrote. Kelley knew this day was coming, didn't want to be a part of it and decided journalism like this just isn't as fun or important as it was. That's my hunch, anyhow. Anyone who knows this man knows that he would have been happiest to keel over on a printing press.

Anyhow, since the Sun won't do it, I will. Here's what I've got so far in terms of who lost their jobs. If you read the papers or the sites, you'll know their names. As Hunter Hillegas of RateVegas.Com mentioned in his comment on my earlier post, they alone could put out a heckuva paper.

I'll update with length of service if people send it along:

1. Josh Bell, movie critic for the Las Vegas Weekly and podcaster of "Josh Bell Hates Everything" for the website. 7 years service.
   
2. Ron Kantowski, sportswriter for the Sun.
3. Mary Manning, environmental writer for the Sun. There at least 20 yrs. I competed with her for stories when I covered Clark County government, and hence the Water District board, more than a decade ago.
4. Steve Silver, sports writer for the Sun.
5. Rob Miech, sports writer for the Sun.
6. Bethany Acree, commercial designer, Greenspun Interactive. 2 years service.
   
7. David Clayton, editorial writer, Sun. Part of Pulitzer-winning team now disbanded that included Drex Heikes (now LA Weekly editor) and Ali Berzon (now with WSJ).
8. Richard Abowitz, writer-at-large for Las Vegas Weekly. Recently also lost his Los Angeles Times blog on Las Vegas to cuts there. Also, possibly the smartest writer and person I've ever met. He brings light reading like Proust to red-carpet events to pass time. Really.
   
9. Jeff German, Sun columnist for at least 20 years. His reporting drove the criminal investigation into the death of Ted Binion. He also used to clash furiously with then-R-J political columnist Jon Ralston.
10. Abigail Goldman, Las Vegas Sun reporter. Broke the story of Nina Radetich's scandalous breach of ethics at KTNV. Hard to fathom that, as Castro survived 9 U.S. presidents, Radetich remains on the air and Abby's done.
11. Jeff Simpson, In Business Las Vegas editor and a member of the "gang" of the Vegas Gang podcast. Also, occasional sparring partner of yours truly on Nevada Week in Review.
12. Melissa Arseniuk, LasVegasSun.Com pop culture writer. Met her covering the O.J. Simpson trial last year, which she Tweeted gavel to gavel for the paper in the first known use of that in Las Vegas. Saw her last night at the Vdara opening and she was upbeat and hopeful.
13. Jerry Fink, entertainment writer and show reviewer for at least 15 years.
14. Jeff Haney, poker and gambling columnist. Just sat next to him through 21 hours of the Final Table of the World Series of Poker last month and have relied on him for years to provide expert commentary to my poker-related stories.
15. Timothy Pratt, minority affairs reporter for the Sun. Tim's probably the only -- or at least one of the few -- bilingual journalists in the Las Vegas mainstream press. Of all these people, the R-J would be wisest to snap him up for the value-added skills and how important covering minority issues and immigration will be in coming years in Las Vegas.
16. Brenden Buhler, the quirk-finding Sun writer whose stories I have linked to repeatedly because they're always original and funny. Three favorites: battling his swamp cooler, beard-trimming mania and resale graves. 3.5 years service.
    
17. Mark Whittington, assistant managing editor.
18. Nicole Lucht, In Business Las Vegas and Sun business writer.
19. Sam Skolnik, City Hall reporter. 3.5 years service.
    
20. Billy Steffens, LasVegasSun.Com multimedia producer who Tweets here and who came in on Saturdays to help Emily and me produce "The Petcast" at the Sun's podcast room until we decided to return to LVRocks.Com.
    
21. Chris Mason, GMG software developer
22. Chris Morris, Sun illustrator and art director
    
23. Mark Damon, Sun director of photography.
24. Brian Sodoma, special publications writer for In Business Las Vegas. 4 years service.
25. Pat Teague, editor of RalstonFlash, Jon Ralston's daily email blast and managing editor of special publications. 1.5 years service.
26. Paul Szydelko, Las Vegas Magazine senior editor and former manager of the late Henderson Home News. 22+-years service.
27. Marcia McMillan, receptionist
28. Keyanna Stewart, photo/graphics technician *
    
29. Joe Boswell, marketing creative director.
30. Beverly Poppe, GMG/Las Vegas Weekly photographer.
31. Richard Serrano, Sun federal agencies reporter.
32. Natasha Shepard, Web producer.
33. Scott Den Herder, Sun multimedia producer
34. John Paul McDonnall, copy editor, edited parts of the Pulitzer-winning series.
    
35. Fred Cohen, copy editor, edited of the Pulitzer-winning series.
36. Colleen Smiley, Vegas Magazine deputy editor.
37. Jamie Delaney, executive assistant to Greenspun web guru Rob Curley.
    

These are in no particular order and I'm happy to add more information about each -- as well as additional names -- when they come available.

[Disclosure: I write a column for the Las Vegas Weekly, owned by Greenspun Media Group.]

Bizarre Attack, Destroyed For Sport

You may recall that a few months ago, the Vegas media world was in an uproar over some truly spectacular corruption committed by inexplicably still-employed KTNV anchor Nina Radetich. The anchor had tipped off an auto repair shop that her station was about to air some negative reports and suggested the owner call Nina's own boyfriend, a damage-control PR specialist.

This was as cut-and-dried a case of journalistic ethical corruption as can be conceived. There were taped phone conversations and the TV station essentially copped to the whole thing, with Radetich never once suggesting the basics of the story as broken by Abigail Goldman of the Las Vegas Sun were inaccurate.

That was well over two months ago. At the time, I jumped into the mix even though I typically do not comment on journalism ethics -- my game is accuracy, fairness, word usage and New Media ineffectiveness, mainly -- this one was so over the top and so many people at KTNV were writing to me in a steam that I did.

So how strange is it that now, all these months later, some dude named Mike Zahara, a political activist who has a history with the local Democratic Party but who seems to play it down the moderate middle on his blog, would decide to take a shot at me. This is a guy who has, in the past, written to me to tell me I was a hero of his. And now this:

The shooting continues unabated! Normally, I would be enjoying this, but I generally like these people and their work and I don’t see a value in its continuation.

The most recent battles began with Nina Radetich and her stuff. Not handled as well as it could have been and her media brothers and sisters had a field day piling on her, culminating with Jon Ralston using his Face-to-Face show and guest Steve Freiss to keep punching away at her affront to ‘journalistic ethics’…while conveniently forgetting to inform that Freiss has no background in ethics education or scholarship and that his husband is employed by fierce rival KVBC across town.

Neither fact was ever disclosed by Ralston or Friess.

I've left the bold-faced parts intact from Zahara's weird passage, the LEAD ITEM of a heading that reads, "Local Media’s Intercine Warfare Continues."


Here's the screenshot so, when he takes it down and pretends he never wrote it, you can see the evidence:


So let's thoroughly discredit Mr. Zahara just for sport, shall we?

POINT: The shooting continues unabated! Normally, I would be enjoying this, but I generally like these people and their work and I don’t see a value in its continuation.

COUNTERPOINT: I haven't written a word about Radetich since mid-September. The shooting has, indeed, abated.

POINT: Not handled as well as it could have been and her media brothers and sisters had a field day piling on her

COUNTERPOINT: Actually, it was handled phenomenally well. The Las Vegas Sun broke the story and followed it up and forced a great deal of discomfort for Radetich and KTNV. Nobody belabored the matter; it was in the news for about one week, maybe 10 days. But there were audio tapes and brought up a very serious problem. Media corruption is at least as significant an issue as governmental corruption but much trickier for the media to cover. In most cities, alternative weeklies keep check but here both are owned by the two competing major media conglomerates. So, given that, I'd say the Radetich matter was handled pitch-perfect. Had the press not reported on this, we'd be accused of covering up for our own. It was undeniably a real news story and was handled with plenty of respect. In fact, I was the one who, in my last post on the matter, asked whether maybe Radetich, whose conduct was unforgivable and indefensible, might nonetheless have been set up. That's called being fair to both sides.

POINT: ...culminating with Jon Ralston using his Face-to-Face show and guest Steve Freiss to keep punching away at her affront to ‘journalistic ethics’…while conveniently forgetting to inform that Freiss has no background in ethics education or scholarship...

COUNTERPOINT: No scholarship, eh? I have a bachelor's in journalism from Northwestern University, widely viewed as the finest undergraduate program in the nation and a program that requires several ethics classes. I've also attended more than one Poynter Institute seminars on ethics, one of which is listed on the resume that is so buried on my website at SteveFriess.Com/Resume. Plus, I've been a practicing journalist for 15 years and have been confronted with and had newsroom discussions about innumerable ethical dilemmas. Meanwhile, Mr. Zahara, who seems to believe that being capable of credibly analyzing the media requires some sort of advanced degree in it, has none of his own but felt competent to write a blog post called "Local Media’s Intercine Warfare Continues" in which he beats the crap out of this city's most respected newspeople, including Jon Ralston and George Knapp. The guy who has not a lick of actual experience as a reporter thinks he can comment on the propriety of what journalists do. And guess what? I agree with him on that. You don't need a degree or "scholarship" to form reasonable opinions about the media, including about me and my work. A little bit of actual information, however, is helpful.

POINT: ...and that his husband is employed by fierce rival KVBC across town. Neither fact was ever disclosed by Ralston or Friess.

COUNTERPOINT: In the 30th second of the first segment of my appearance with Ralston, Jon states in introducing me: "He has particular insight into the TV industry as he's married to an executive producer of Channel 3." I'm also quite sure that during my comments, I referenced things I knew about Nina's departure from Channel 3 and acknowledged how I knew this, but I don't see the point in spending any more time on this given how thoroughly I've demonstrated that Zahara has no fucking clue what he's talking about.

And just one more thing, Mr. Zahara: It's Friess, not Freiss. At NU, I would've been failed for screwing up a pivotal name in a piece. I left that for last here, though, because as egregious as that mistake is and as much as it lays bare your inability to fact-check even the most elementary parts of what you write, it's actually the very least of your worries.

The Last Words On Nina (This Week)

As the week concludes, the scandal engulfing KTNV over anchor Nina Radetich's betrayal of her colleagues and her journalistic creed is showing no signs of letting up. CityLife's Andrew Kiraly chimed in, too. Read that if you're not up-to-speed on what Nina did since I'm tired of rewriting the basics.

But I'm already bored with flogging Nina. I've got other questions. Like: What if she, too, is a victim?

The owner of the auto repair shop, Roshie Weightman, apparently may file a federal lawsuit against the ABC affiliate and/or Radetich on Monday. This is, frankly, a bizarre idea but it does start to fill out the rest of the scandal.

As unforgivable as Nina's conduct was, I'm struggling to think up what law she broke, let alone what federal law she broke. She may have tried to drum up some business for her PR flak boyfriend Jack Finn by suggesting Finn do the damage control, but she didn't suggest to Weightman that she could be, say, bribed to keep the stories off the air or even to alter them. Even if so, that would be a local infraction, not a federal one. Another notion is that Weightman's suit could allege a civil rights infringement but, again, what's civil rights got to do with this?

So why file a federal lawsuit? From what I'm hearing, it's something of a pre-emptive move because it is now clear from the way Weightman talked about it on Jon Ralston's show yesterday that she recorded the conversation without Nina Radetich's prior consent. The law in Nevada requires two-party consent for phone recordings, but federal statutes supercede that under certain circumstances.

Anyhow, I was on Ralston's show yesterday, too. You can click on the image below to get to play my segment and, from there, see the other three parts, too.


So while Nina's gotten a deserved lambasting all week, let's not forget that Weightman's operation has been under investigation by not just KTNV but also by the Nevada state Consumer Affairs Division, which filed a lawsuit against Tire Works alleging fraudulent practices. On Ralston's show, she claimed her shop has been cleared of everything, but that lawsuit is still pending according to this Las Vegas Sun report from Wednesday. So she's no angel either, even as she plays the victim in her conversation with Ralston and elsewhere.

Also deserving of some scrutiny: The Las Vegas Sun. Someone turned a recording over the Sun's Abigail Goldman, who wrote in her initial scoop: "The source who provided the recording to the Sun assured the newspaper that it was obtained legally."

Now how could that be, really? Did they hear Nina on the recording stating she was OK with being recorded on the phone? (Radetich declined comment for the story, so Goldman couldn't ask her directly, obviously.) Did the Sun ask its own in-house attorneys whether there was a reasonable legal path for these tapes to have been created legally?

Again, the argument developing from Weightman's camp is that she can flout Nevada law because they had a potential federal case. Does that notion, too, not deserve media skepticism? I mean, how cool! What a neat legal trick! Do we all, then, have permission to surreptitiously record conversations because something might possibly, however unlikely, turn out to be something? And then do we get to sit on that potential evidence for six months and play the incriminating parts for the media at an opportune moment even before a judge has heard it and has determined whether the situation warranted such a disregard for local law? Isn't it odd that Weightman, if she feels federally violated, didn't first file the federal case and then enter the recordings as evidence? Because clearly the only one who can actually determine whether these recordings were made legally is a judge, right?

This brings me to the Nina-as-victim part. Nobody seems able to say why this is coming out now when the conversations happened in March. Could it be that Weightman was threatening Radetich with exposure or legal action? Why would you not deploy such explosive recordings, say, at the same time as the station is airing damaging reports about you? Isn't that weird, too?

I wonder how much these questions were discussed at the Sun. Goldman declined to comment Friday and I was unable to reach Mike Kelley, the Sun's managing editor because my brain didn't wander down this bunny trail until after 6 p.m.

Why does it matter? Because journalists generally don't exploit information and materials offered to them that are obtained illegally as that encourages other sources to break the law to produce evidence. We'd end up giving incentive to people who would plant bugs on one another, hack into one another's computers, break into other people's filing cabinets and so on. The court would never allow such evidence to be heard, but if the media were willing to distribute it then an aggrieved party could -- anonymously, even, as in this case -- try someone in the court of public opinion. Even most of the paparazzi usually abide by the law in pursuit of their version of scoop.

There are certain heroic and important cases when the value of the information is so important to the public's well-being or exposing wrongdoing at the highest levels of power that it is done, but the Sun made a specific point in its piece to say that they were satisfied that the tapes were created legally.

It also matters because it begins to become clear what's really going on here. Weightman is using the media to deflect from the fact that she is the target of a corruption probe of her own. And the next act of this, a federal lawsuit, is aimed at both keeping the attention on Radetich's journalistic sins and inoculating herself against a charge that she may have violated Nevada's recordings law!

That's brilliant! See that, Nina? Weightman didn't need your boyfriend's help after all!

Revisiting the Rob Blair Case

Since it's been in discussion and occasional "The Strip" co-host Amy found this for me, I thought I'd post it. It's weatherman Rob Blair in a taped weekend weather cut-in, which means it's the short clip you see sometimes on CNN or during a national broadcast. It also means that editors recorded, watched, cut and transmitted it knowing its content.



I know it's debatable what he said and the sound quality here isn't great. But in these cases, reasonable people ought to give the poor kid the benefit of the doubt. The alternative -- that he's a blatant, crazy racist who was waiting to drop slurs along with a warming trend -- is simply nonsensical.

Yet any which way, in the twisted journalistic universe of KTNV General Manager Jim Prather, that qualifies for a summary firing and the total jeopardy of a young career but he'll stand "100 percent" behind a seasoned, experienced lead anchor who he acknowledged had leaked a story to sources and then offered to help them to mitigate the damage? Huh?

Also, it's Day Five of this. Where the hell is Nina Radeitch's public apology to her newsroom and the news-viewing public? Blair apologized immediately. And Ron Futrell, as we've said, didn't even get a chance to prove his innocence. But Nina? She's golden. And nobody has any idea why.

P.S. Blair seems to have recovered well. He's now a weatherman in Chico, Calif.

How Does This Woman Still Have A Job?

[UPDATE: Prather says Nina stays. Amazing.]

That, to your right, is Nina Radetich. She's a local TV anchor for the ABC affiliate here, KTNV, Channel 13, and she has been one of the best-paid media personalities in the city for a few years now. In fact, she was seen as such a "get" that when she was lured away from KVBC (where my partner is executive producer but was not when Nina was still there), KTNV actually paid her a salary for a year not to work because she had a one-year non-compete clause. Little good it did their ratings (they've fallen since her arrival, in fact) as anyone with half a brain could have told them, but hey, ya roll the dice.

On Saturday, the Las Vegas Sun blew the lid off a fairly shocking -- even for Vegas -- scandal in which, according to audio recordings of phone conversations, she not only told the owner of an auto repair chain that a damaging undercover report was coming soon but that her own boyfriend could help do public-relations damage control! Her boyfriend is Jack Finn, formerly a spokesman for Sen. John Ensign and former Gov. Kenny Guinn and presently a special projects manager at NV Energy. Now he's doing damage-control spin for Nina in the story by defending her journalism which is cool for him since Nina is heard on the tape saying how much Jack loves that kinda work!

Abigail Goldman of the Las Vegas Sun broke this story in a banner across the top of the paper on Saturday. Read it; it's brutal and damning. Goldman had heard audio recordings and provided a transcript to Radetich's boss, KTNV veep and GM Jim Prather. Goldman paraphrased Prather as regarding the matter a "lapse of judgment" and assured the public that their probes into Tire Works, the auto chain, would be unimpeded. Somehow I'm thinking Darcy Spears, the investigative reporter whose work was leaked, doesn't feel that way.

As of right now, Radetich remains in the employ of Channel 13, although she did not come into work today and her scheduled anchor duties tonight will be performed by Tiffani Sargent. Tomorrow's have been reassigned, too, to Jessica Lovell. And then she's on a previously planned vacation from Wednesday to Friday anyhow.

That's so nice and deliberative of her bosses. They weren't nearly as pleasant or patient or reasonable when 25-year veteran Ron Futrell got a hit-and-run citation last year. He was canned before the sun set the next day even though he hurt nobody, impacted nothing in the way of coverage and -- even better! -- the charges were ultimately dropped. That's loyalty to a guy who gave them the best years of his life, huh?

Or how about poor Rob Blair, who lost his job at KTNV as a weatherman in 2005 after he stumbled the word "Martin Luther King Jr" in a way that some thought sounded like "Martin Luther Coon Jr." (I still don't think he did this, but I couldn't find a YouTube clip for you to judge for yourself.) Blair's remarks weren't even live; several people in the newsroom saw them before they aired but only Blair lost his job. He even went on the air to apologize and still, he was auf'd so fast Nina Radetich wouldn't even have been able to leak it to anyone!

Blair hightailed outta town after that, but Futtrell stuck around, having spent his adult life here and all. He's now one of us New Media folk. But getting a raw deal from a boss like Prather, who clearly plays favorites at the expense of news judgment, makes Futtrell a bit of a hero at the station and he's got lots of friends over there still.

He says his former colleagues are understandably nervous about what it does to their news-gathering abilities and reputations if Nina remains in place. None would speak publicly today but Ron's views are undoubtedly shared by many there.

"If she walks in the building, there's going to be an attitude of, 'We better not tell Nina,' " Futtrell said. "The first thing to think of is keep it from Nina if you have an expose. And what if you're somebody from the outside and you want to give Channel 13 a big investigative story. You trust the reporter, but are they going to be able to keep it from one of their anchors? It throws everything out of kilter."

What's so weird here is how greedy or vain Radetich had to be to throw her career away like this. She's unmarried, has no kids and makes well over $200,000. Her boyfriend is surely well compensated at the power utility. What possible motive could she have for betraying her newsroom brethren? To paraphrase Peggy Olson's remark to Don Draper last night on Madmen, she had everything her colleagues want -- and so much of it.

There is no way she can continue to work at that station or in this business at all, at least not without a period of time away. It would make no sense. Even if she apologized now, you have to figure the staff there is checking with their sources to see if this is an isolated case. Could it possibly be? Really? Does that seem likely?

And even if/when Radetich is fired, how does Prather look his employees in the eye and tell them that he treats them all with the same fairness and respect? How does he explain that Radetich got more than four days -- Prather obviously knew about this on Friday for him to give his ridiculous response to Goldman and keep Nina on the payroll -- but Futrell is fired within mere hours for something so much less germane to the actual job?

The longer this carries on, the harder it gets to explain not only how Radetich remains employed over there but how Prather does, too.

Nicely done, Mr. Knapp!

I don't ordinarily wade into commentary about the local TV news because my partner, Miles, is the executive producer at KVBC, the NBC affiliate here. That makes it difficult and awkward and, happily, the Review-Journal's Steve Bornfeld has his "Mediaology" column analyzing the topic so I don't have to.

But it's a pretty big deal that George Knapp of KLAS, the local CBS affiliate, has won a George Foster Peabody Award this week for their special, "Crossfire: Water, Power and Politics," a hard-hitting analysis of the impact of growth on the southwestern U.S. You can view all seven parts via this LasVegasNow.Com link. Also honored was Knapp's photojournalist, Matt Adams.

To get an idea of what a huge deal this is -- it's the equal to the R-J winning a Pulitzer -- consider who else got Peabody honors this year: ABC for "Lost," HBO for "The Gates" and "John Adams," NBC for its Beijing Olympics coverage, PBS for "Washington Week With Gwen Ifill" and CNN for its coverage of the presidential primaries.

Congrats, Mr. Knapp. Let's hope your station can continue to spend this kind of money on this kind of journalism in these, you know, tough economic times.

Silence on Dead Baby At Excalibur

Catching up on the local papers that accumulated while I was in Florida, I was stunned to find a shocking little story buried inside the local section of the R-J several days ago.

Hotel workers at Excalibur found a dead newborn boy -- placenta and umbilical cord intact -- in the trash in a public bathroom. The corpse was wrapped in a pillowcase and stuffed in an Excalibur gift bag.

The baby was found on Mother's Day, May 11. The news seems to have broken about it on Monday evening on the Las Vegas Sun's website with this piece. There was that short, obligatory piece in the Review-Journal the next day. The Associated Press picked up the tale, too, giving it a little more attention.

And that's it. Nobody in the local media has followed up since even though, according to the AP story, "police say their best hope may be the public."

I'm not sure why this bothers me so much. It just seems like a bigger deal than has been made of it, especially considering I've lived in cities where abandoned baby corpses have become front-page news for days. Here's one in perhaps the most popular tourist corridor in the world, and nobody seems to much care.

The Publisher Responds, Sorta...

...with this from his own comments section, where I'm being pretty soundly bloodied:

"Everyone's in agreement: Steve Friess is an idiot."

Wow. The publisher of a major newspaper can't do better than name-calling after his fictitious points have been defeated in this space. And this is what I get for *agreeing* with his conclusions about Web traffic even though I arrived at mine at first by taking a look at the figures for the web domain that APPEARS ON HIS NEWSPAPER'S OWN FLAG.

Oh! And while we're on the subject of sloppy errors, Sherm lied to his audience in an April 6 column in which he (don't ask, not worth explaining but, according to his acolytes, I'm the self-congratulatory idiot) refers to himself as "the king":

"The king wishes to thank all readers of the Review-Journal for their much-appreciated loyalty. Because of readers such as you, the Las Vegas Review-Journal will be one of the few metropolitan newspapers in the country to post a nice gain in paid circulation this year."

Except they didn't have a nice gain. He's writing for a Sunday audience that shrank 2 percent. He told me so when I asked, knowing the numbers would be public soon anyway. They lost about 4,000 readers last year. They're down to about 200,000 Sunday readers.

That's an interesting number because in 1998 or 1999 (can't remember which) when I was an R-J staffer, we had a party to celebrate the newspaper's cracking the 200,000 mark for Sunday circulation. Uh, didn't like a million people move here in the same time period? And aren't you now at 1998 or 1999 levels? And I'm the idiot? The King thanks you!

Perhaps the "nice gain" to which he referred was in the newspaper's daily circulation? That's up 1.2 percent in 2007, meaning they picked up just 2,068 new readers. This is something to boast? Don't any of the tens of thousands who move here monthly, especially the large retiree populations who live for their newspapers, at least want the coupons or Beetle Bailey?

The best part is, even with that small gain, the paper is still down 7.2 percent from its 2006 figures, having shed 13,447 readers since then! And, by the by, the 2006 figures were inflated because that was the first reporting period after the Las Vegas Sun started being delivered inside the R-J in the fall of 2005.

"Everyone's in agreement: Steve Friess is an idiot."

How dignified. At least I don't brag about things I ought to be embarrassed by.

Review-Journal, Meet the 21st Century

(Disclosure: I worked for the R-J from 1996-99 and have written for CityLife, owned by parent Stephens Media Group. I'm a regular contributor to two Greenspun Media Group magazines. Greenspun owns the Sun.)

I just had a piece on Harrah's decision to 86 the R-J from its properties posted on the New York Times' The Lede blog for which I had a lengthy, wide-ranging and very interesting conversation with Review-Journal publisher Sherman Frederick.

As always, not everything of interest fit in the piece or was appropriate to include. But in the process, the publisher of "Nevada's largest newspaper," as he himself said immediately when he called me back, opened up wide about some significant changes about to come.

1. The Beast Gets Hungrier. The most important change is that by June, reporters will be expected to file material for the Web roughly every THREE hours. Being a former R-J scribe who didn't much like my workload tampered with (so I went freelance partly to be paid for every additional piece of work), I asked Frederick whether the reporters would be receiving any pay boost in the process. I think he laughed.

Uh, no. "I don’t think there's any need for that. Unless people have to work longer, I don’t see that as a primary issue." Sorry, everyone! Your output was just tripled! At least you're not getting outsourcing as the folks in this clip were. Yet.

(Aside: I remember being very bitter around 1998 when I was covering the county government beat and we were suddenly told we had to contribute, for free, to a new afternoon e-mail blast from then-R-J pundit Jon Ralston. Several of us were so ticked off that we tried to undermine the project by forwarding the emails every day to people who we knew would otherwise subscribe. Evidently since then, I've come to embrace this newfangled technology. Also, I grew up. Forgive me, Jon.)

Frederick explained the thinking behind the changes so: "Right now, our reporters have one deadline per day. That’s how we’ve done it now, that’s the way we’ve done it for 50 years. We’re going to do a three-hour deadline, posting stories continuously throughout the day." Maybe that's how they've been doing it for 50 years, but most major papers scrapped that model about 5 years ago.

2. About The Godawful R-J Site: Frederick mentioned there's a lot of criticism of the look and functionality of his site, that even some inside the paper think ReviewJournal.Com is "thick." I informed him I have been one of those critics, that it looks like the work of technologists, not journalists or artists.

I asked if a redesign is in the offing and he said no major overhaul is currently in the works although they've already started adding more breaking news bulletins and they have a prominent box advertising some new blogs, including one by Frederick. That's progress in and of itself; an R-J reporter two years ago told me that the top newsroom editors "don't believe in blogs."

3. And About That Delovely Sun Site: The new website for the Sun, the R-J's crosstown rival and JOA partner, looks beautiful. But, Frederick asserted, it's also a bit of a failure. Traffic spiked for a few days after they rolled out the sensational new redesign, but then it fell to back to pre-launch levels. He's right. According to this graph from Alexa.Com, the Sun's traffic is even lower than a year ago. Or click on this graph to below to enlarge a comparison of R-J and Sun web hits.

"They spent a lot of money to do that, but the statistics are crystal clear," he said. "They instituted the redesign and their eyeballs went down. I know the journalist community swoons over that. It’s pretty. It’s got bells. It’s got whistles. And it's got less viewership than they did before." (I'm emailing folks at the Sun for response to this. As we know, they don't respond all that much, though.) Frederick noted that, doing nothing, the R-J remains the biggest news website in Nevada.

This reflects a problem many always had with the paper, that it's too complacent and feeds too easily off of the fat of this boomtown. The paper's a cash cow -- Frederick even said they've seen no classified ad decline caused by the rise of Craigslist -- so who cares if they have only one overworked reporter to cover the nation's fifth largest school district when most newspapers of this size and smaller have teams of education writers? Who cares if there are Pulitzers left unwon in this town? Who cares if the features section in the Entertainment Capital of the World is largely populated by wire copy? To quote a certain reviled public official much admired by the R-J editorial page staff, "So?"

4. A special edition for the Strip? For many years now the traditional R-J has been ensconced in a special tourist wrap-around with travel advice, show information and Norm! to entice Strip-area buyers uninterested in the doings of the North Las Vegas City Council. It hasn't really worked all that well. Aside from the meager 600 copies of the paper sold at 24 Harrah's locations until the company booted them, the paper generally sells about 7,000 copies at newsstands around what's referred to as "the resort corridor." On any given day, more than 150,000 people can be staying in the same area, a city unto itself. Frederick has been pondering how to address that, given that there's an unfilled niche for tourists looking for daily content about the Strip that currently they can only get from such weekly publications as Las Vegas Magazine.

"We’ve had extensive discussions that maybe we should create a tab to target visitors," he said. "It’s still something that sits on the drawing board." There's also some consideration being given to resort-corridor distribution. There aren't any newspaper boxes on the Strip, partly because of the county's efforts to reduce the sidewalk clutter created by porn leafleteers, but Frederick says the day may come when he's got newspaper hawkers on the sidewalks selling the paper. I don't know about that, but the fact is, he's right: This city should totally have something like the New York Post, something cheeky and irreverent and easy to handle and sexy and thoroughly insulting to the intelligence. Potential Page Three girls are everywhere!

There was more from the Frederick discussion, but I'll blog it later or tomorrow. That's enough for now. I have to prep for tonight's live version of "The Strip" podcast. Join us in the chat at lvrocks.com at 6 pm PT!