My Only Reaction

So Sad Shermy wrote another diatribe responding to this. Given that his premise is that I don't value the fight against copyright theft and that's so obviously untrue to anyone who can read or listen to the radio, I can't see the point of bothering to rebut any of his other silliness. Besides, it appears his many commenters have handled that for me. I'll let you go find it for yourself if you wish, but I'm not all that eager to perpetuate this nonsense. My remarks are analysis of facts; his are just invented inanity. You can't argue with invented inanity.

But I am fascinated by one particular comment on Sad Shermy's blog from none other than unceremoniously dumped former editor Thomas Mitchell, whose lengthy tenure at the helm was honored by the company with about a full sentence deep in a news release. Here's what he wrote about my prior post regarding the debacle in which Righthaven, the law firm partnering with the R-J to sue folks who lifted their material, got spanked in court:

I really don't care what Friess has to say on any topic. But I take considerable umbrage with the last paragraph of his meandering screed:

"It's quite unlikely that Thevenot would've been able to cover this quite so properly if Sherm were still in charge. So there's that."

I assure you Friess was never in any position whatsoever to evaluate the integrity, ethics or journalistic values of anyone in management at the newspaper. If Sherm were still in charge, if anything, the story might've gotten more prominent play.

I defend that stance against all comers.

That is a stunning moment of dishonesty and imperiousness if ever there was one. EVERY reader is in a position to evaluate the integrity, ethics and journalistic values of a publication and its editorial choices. This perspective tracks back to that time that Mitchell wrote a column about how much he despised bloggers because they borrow and reference other work. That post borrowed and referenced Orwell, but he didn't catch the irony. Mitchell's had a rough go of the changes in the business, as reflected in that column as well as this comment, because, essentially, he found it maddening that he and his no longer could decide who gets to voice their views. Mitch couldn't dictate or moderate the public discourse anymore thanks to the Internet, and it drove him bananas.

But beyond that, I find it pretty hilarious that Mitchell suggests Sad Shermy would have dictated bigger, broader coverage of this week's action in which a judge smacked around Sad Shermy and his lawyers for possibly deceiving the courts. He can try to "defend that stance to all comers," except there's this little problem:


That's a search of the Review-Journal archive for the term "Righthaven." It may look like a lot, but five of the eight entries are actually blog posts by Sad Shermy. That means that in the course of the past year, as more than 200 Righthaven lawsuits were being filed and this unusual way to combat copyright fraud was being covered intensively by the national/journalism/tech media, the R-J printed a grand total of THREE proper news stories and no letters.

It gets better! The first, as I mentioned, was when they sued Senate candidate Sharron Angle. The second was when they sued the Drudge Report. And the third was yesterday, when a judge castigated them for alleged dishonesty.

Tom Mitchell and Sad Shermy were fired in November. Two of the three of those pieces ran after that. So they presided over precisely one single story on their nationally newsworthy and unique campaign against copyright fraud.

Yet Mitchell would like us to believe he and Sad Shermy would have INSISTED on full, ever more prominent coverage of this decision! Because, uh, they committed all of 482 words to the matter under their oversight of the newspaper?

As the kids say: For realz?

R-J Publisher On KNPR, Two Weeks Late

Just as Miles and I were tearing out of Vegas for our NYC sojourn earlier this month, newly installed R-J publisher Bob Brown appeared on KNPR's State of Nevada. I caught up on that today while baking my special brownies for Miles' KSNV potluck tomorrow.

I continue to be accosted by various quarters as "rumor-mongering" for my coverage of the wholesale replacement of the entire upper management of the Review-Journal as having been a result of the disastrous jeremiad against Sen. Harry Reid by ex-publisher Sherm Frederick and editor Thomas Mitchell.

But a few crucial moments on that show can be seen as evidence I was correct:

* Brown said his selection as R-J publisher was very sudden and unexpected, that he took a couple of minutes to deliberate, if that. So the idea that an orderly succession was planned for a long time is hereby debunked. This actually surprises me; I was willing to believe that Frederick stepped aside willingly and had planned on it for at least a little while. Evidently not.

* Brown said the first person to call to congratulate him was . . . Sen. Harry Reid. Now you would think it would be -- assuming this all was friendly -- Sherm Frederick, his allegedly voluntarily departing predecessor. Or maybe some of the many gaming execs he knows from his years as the ad director. But, no, somehow word got to Reid first and Reid was on the phone with Brown asap. Hmm.

* Brown repeatedly rebuffed the notion that the R-J or Stephens Media were in any sort of financial trouble. It's no crime to acknowledge that these are challenging days for the newspaper industry, but Brown seems to be describing the local newspaper as actually being in very good health. That means that the change of chiefs was not related to revenues or circulation.

* Brown agreed with the SON host that the paper found itself in an awkward and untenable position during the Reid-Angle race and spoke about the importance of earning a better reputation and credibility with the local public.

Brown didn't so much throw Frederick under the bus as lay him gently on the median of a busy thoroughfare and wave buh-bye. His unwillingness to heartily defend the prior leadership was refreshing.

Also refreshing was Brown's stated insistence on letting the news side do its work. While I had worried that his history as an ad guy with no journalistic background could portend a publisher willing to compromise with advertisers at the expense of his reporters, I had forgotten that he's certainly been on the receiving end of countless angry calls about coverage from local companies who buy space in the papers. He has had practice dealing with these matters, so we ought to give him a chance.

The only trouble spot I heard in the KNPR chat was Brown's comment that the R-J's website is great. It's not. It's a train wreck. Hopefully he was just being polite and knows how badly it needs to be overhauled.

All in all, I'm encouraged by this interview. Also, I'm validated by it. That's always fun.

Review-Journal Publisher, Editor AND GM Are Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plenty of questions left:

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

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

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

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

Memo To Sherm: YOU Are The Ankle-Biter

Review-Journal publisher Sherm Frederick continues his bizarre, classless and graceless reaction to Harry Reid's victory in the mid-term and Jon Ralston's dead-on analysis of the polling data and pre-election prediction by trying to defend his pollsters after they missed the mark in spectacular ways on every major race.

Two pieces of his latest depressingly delusional defense point the way towards the problem with Sherm and editor Thomas Mitchell's entire stewardship of the Review-Journal. First, there's this:

Here's the New York Times' ranking of the accuracy of national polling firms. Halfway down the link you will see a chart. The R-J pollster, Mason Dixon, is in the middle of the pack.

There you have it, folks: The R-J is satisfied not just with being wrong but with being average. And that's with everything. Sherm's A-OK with getting by on the bare minimum of overworked reporters, with a functional but challenging website, with only a few stand-out writers, with middling, flat circulation. And now, Sherm is admitting, "middle of the pack" is something to brag about even as it has now shown that readers will be misinformed.

What's even sadder? If you look at the list he references, he doesn't even read it right. Their firm, Mason-Dixon, is at the BOTTOM of the pack. They're fifth of eight firms in accuracy, but two firms below M-D are tied in their inaccuracy, so really it's fifth out of seven scores. Also, M-D was off by an average of 4.6 points, and the No. 4 firm missed by 3.8 percent, a large gap that puts M-D in a red zone of inaccuracy because most polls offer a +/-4 margin of error. The results were outside the poll's margin. And in the case of the Titus-Heck race for Congress, Sherm's pollster had Heck winning by a blowout of 10 when he actually won by less than a point.

And then there's this gem from Sherm:

We're the big boys on the block. We're used to ankle-biters like the Jon "I-AM-A-GENIUS!" Ralston & crew who try to elevate themselves by taunting No. 1.

Except that they're NOT. They ceded that pole position long ago by aspiring to be nothing more than average. Their penetration of this market is less than the major papers in similar-sized cities and Web users flock in droves to the Sun's website long before they go to the R-J's for political news. Their longstanding practice of refusing to link out to other sites -- finally reversed -- and, of course, the horrid publicity from the Righthaven efforts to enforce copyrights have dramatically reduced the interest of others to link to them. In numerous ways, the R-J has removed itself from the legitimate conversation.

People baffle as to how I don't see the alleged right-wing bias in the news pages. But I don't because I know how newsrooms work and what really leads to lackluster journalism. In the R-J's case, the problem is far, far more that they still believe they are living in a different, much lazier and entitled media era, one that flows from a belief that there's such a thing as a "big boy." The R-J peeps think they can keep a Web audience without constantly updating information because they pine for the days when they could make everyone wait until sunrise for whatever they had to say. Their reporters don't blog in any consistent way that would develop a following, they think that if they ignore a hot story the Sun or Ralston or I have that it won't be a part of the news cycle, and they think that acknowledging competition is a weakness rather than a show of confidence.

All of this leaves the Review-Journal as the ankle-biter and, fittingly, completely unaware of same. They're not the big boys in any respect. Numbers alone, if they even had that to back such a claim up, don't make it thus. How many times did anyone from the R-J get invited on any cable news show -- even on Fox! -- to discuss the election? When did the HuffPo or Drudge or Politico point towards something insightful the R-J did this cycle? In what form did Sherm Frederick's jeremiad on Harry Reid have any impact whatsoever on the result of the election?

Nobody with any serious intellect -- not smart readers, not power players of either party in this city, county, state or nation, not even the sort of credible national conservatives who reference the National Review or the Washington Times as offering interesting points of view -- cares what Sherm Frederick has to say.

Why do I, then? Well, for one thing, it's entertaining to watch someone with so much hubris choke on his own venom. The hypocrisy is so seductive to observe that it's almost like porn. Sherm Frederick, after everything he's done and said, has the nerve to suggest journalists who chose to hold Sharron Angle accountable for her outlandish remarks and elusiveness were exhibiting a bias? Dude, remember that thing about what to do when you find yourself in a hole? Stop digging.

This also has long worried me because there are good, earnest folks at the R-J whose work is overshadowed and tainted by what he does. Frederick in this cycle sold out his reporters, preferring to stand with a candidate who stole his content, refused to speak to even his scribes and deployed insanely childish efforts to confound the media. He owns a media company; his knee-jerk should have been to be outraged by such behavior.

And, finally, a word about Jon Ralston. Sherm wrote this in advance of Jon's How-Harry-Won column in tomorrow's paper:

If you can find a disclosure in the column explaining Ralston's spectacular conflict in analyzing said campaign, let me know and I'll give you a sucker.

Jon Ralston knows no ideological bias. Really. He and I are not friends and I'm well aware he has little fondness for me, but to suggest that Ralston is in the tank for a particular party, ideology or human being (other than Jon Ralston) is idiotic. Anyone who has read or watched him for an extended period of time knows his instinctive journalistic muscle is for honesty and truth, except when it comes to media criticism.

In politics, though, when Ralston senses bullshit, he attacks. There have been plenty of Democrats whose dishonesty he has been vicious about, most notably Mayor Oscar Goodman. He's not always right, but he always asks hard questions and is openly dismayed whenever something doesn't compute to him. There is no question that Ralston was hard on Sharron Angle, but not because she was a Republican. It's because she was a constant liar and someone who made some statements -- Second Amendment remedies comes to mind -- that were downright dangerous.

Ralston did not sneak into the polling places with thousands of people to know how they voted. He looked at numbers, weighed a number of factors from his long history as a journalist and Nevadan, had a pipeline to polling that made more demographic sense than everything else. It wasn't magic. He applied his knowledge of such math and began early and often to sound the bell that the polls were wrong. That takes guts; it's so much easier to go with the conventional wisdom.

I speak from experience. Take a look at this:


The green was me on Oct. 22. I told several people weeks before the election that I thought Reid would win by a few points. But the steady stream of polls and the makeup of the early voting data dissuaded me from saying so publicly. By Election Day, I was sure Angle had it and spent the day gathering material in advance of a Reid defeat as well as for the stories to come from that in the days to come. I had the instinct, but I didn't listen to it. It was easier to go with the flow or at least mute myself rather than look incompetent. It's the difference between me and Ralston; he's done this a long time, he knows things I don't and he stuck to his guns.

Sherm Frederick stuck to his guns, too. And that's fine. But now he's found out his guns were empty. And he's still sticking to them. He thinks that the fact that other Republicans won redeems his prognostications and shows he had some influence somewhere, but Ralston predicted other Republicans would win, too. In fact, Jon suggested one or two of the statewide Democratic officeholders might fall, too, and none did. Ralston also has never argued with Frederick's assertion that Obama and Reid are unpopular in Nevada; he just questioned how that would translate in actual balloting.

That's not ideology, it's analysis. Ideology is twisting yourself into a pretzel to stand up for a view that has been discredited. And now the only question for Frederick is just how much more irretrievably irrelevant he can make himself.

The best part for those of us chomping popcorn at home? He won't even know what he's done to himself.

RJ Publisher Hates The Media!!!

Sherm, man. I've tried. I really, really have tried. I've done more than anyone in this state to evaluate your reporters' work as separate from your advocacy, to allow you your opinions, to acknowledge that your counterparts at the Las Vegas Sun are at least equally tainted in their strident, overt political views on the Reid-Angle race and how it impacts their coverage.

But last night, you truly and spectacularly hit a new low. I am in awe of you, and in the worst possible way.

In Review-Journal publisher Sherm Frederick's latest blog post, he celebrates (!) the fact that Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle faked out the media. He thinks it's cool, clever and amusing that a woman who would represent the state in the most powerful deliberative body on Earth is so afraid of answering questions from reporters that she deploys a decoy to throw them off her trail.

If Sherm Frederick were any old Republican political hack -- and, frankly, he may very well be -- maybe I'd get this. But he is the publisher of the state's largest newspaper. His most important "political position" ought to be in the service of ensuring his reporters can do their jobs, that his publication be as unfettered as possible in the pursuit of getting information and providing it to the public. He ought to be viscerally offended by the behavior of someone like Angle at this stage of this important historic moment.

Instead, we have a major newspaper publisher who thinks it's a riot when a candidate who has been shown to have lied incessantly and repeatedly is so uncertain of her ability to talk to the media that she resorts to juvenile trickery. We have a major newspaper publisher who parrots the Rush Limbaugh-Sarah Palin line about a "compliant press" when he knows they're just trying to get a woman on the verge of immense power to subject herself to the same scrutiny and rigors that politicians have always expected and the public demands and needs. What would he, as a publisher and lifelong newspaperman, have the state's journalists do, sit home until next week and then dutifully report the outcome? Angle didn't even have the guts to speak to HIS reporters since her primary victory; is he saying his own reporters are "compliant" and unworthy of her attention?

Frederick is welcome to support Angle. That's his choice. But his top job is running a news operation and ensuring its legitimacy and viability. Is it really unreasonable for journalists to want to speak to the focal point of the most significant news story of the year as that story is about to climax? That's compliance?

No, Sherm. That's their jobs. And you just sold out yours for a cheap political attack.

R-J's Angle Suit Tops Top Journalism Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R-J Finally Covers Its Own Copyright Efforts

With the exception of some commentary by publisher Sherman Frederick -- and on his blog, not in print, I believe -- the Review-Journal has not covered its own unusual and very newsworthy efforts to enforce its copyrights via a large spate of lawsuits against all sorts of websites. That has been left to Steve Green of the Las Vegas Sun, who has done a terrific job.

Until today.

The decision to sue U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle for $150,000 and ownership of her domain name, it seems, tipped that balance. That moves this matter into a campaign issue rather leaving it as just a journalistic or technology story, so today courts reporter Carri Geer Thevenot put it in print.

Unfortunately, she allowed Righthaven LLC CEO Steve Gibson to reference me incorrectly and didn't provide me any chance to respond, nor did she quote from this blog the passages that would contradict him.

"Hopefully, Mr. Friess will understand that our present action against Ms. Angle demonstrates that we don't follow a political agenda," Gibson said.

Huh? I never said otherwise. In fact, what I said was that because they have shown they wouldn't discriminate on that basis, they were dutibound to follow through on this. On Aug. 23, I wrote:

The Righthaven approach is to sue first, ask questions later and Gibson has been proud of not taking an ideological slant in which sites they attack. This means even if Angle takes these down, they still must sue her and pursue damages.

See? I just thought it would make for a fascinating political sideshow. I had my doubters, of course, but I was right. And that's always fun.

The R-J's first entry here was a straightforward courts story, though, and it lacked any balance other than an attempt to reach the Angle campaign for comment. What Carri didn't do was contact experts in copyright or Internet law to find out or explain to readers how unusual, controversial and legally confusing this effort is. And, by the by, yesterday Righthaven also won a legal victory in which a judge refused to dismiss the lawsuit against a Texas website owner accused of infringement. So at least that could have been mentioned, even if the news broke too late to do the other sort of coverage I just mentioned.

The Angle campaign didn't respond, but Thevenot might have taken notice that they have, in fact, removed the full stories from their site and provided a link after a few paragraphs to the ReviewJournal.Com. Here's an example of what it looked like then...


...and now:


It's also disappointing that Thevenot had access to people who could answer some important questions and either didn't ask or couldn't get those answers. For instance, why did they only sue the campaign for the two pieces when I counted at least half-dozen? Will they now be going after the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, too, and risk angering a potentially very lucrative advertiser? Have they let the Las Vegas Advisor suit languish in order to preserve the source relationship between Anthony Curtis and R-J journalists? On what basis have they settled with some of the defendants?

Also, while I support efforts to enforce copyright, I am skeptical that Righthaven can wrest away a domain name that contains someone else's intellectual property, i.e., someone's name. There is case law on this, as I cited in the prior post. They may be able to sue and even shut down a website, but can they seriously come to possess SharronAngle.Com? And why would they even want to?

Maybe now that the R-J has begun to cover itself, we'll get the answers. In the meantime, let's see where it goes. By not commenting, of course, Angle's side has guaranteed this story gets a few more news cycles before it quiets down, if it does at all.

This week's LVW Col: the R-J Copyright Suits

While the rest of the media takes cheap shots derived from their ideological or personal differences, I present the other way on the R-J lawsuit drama for this week's Las Vegas Weekly. And bravo for the Weekly for letting me do it, given the blood feud between its owner and Sherm Frederick. Read on. -sf

Defending the R-J’s copyright suits
By STEVE FRIESS

Sherm Frederick is right.

Stew in that for a moment. I know, it’s hard to digest. You can’t imagine how difficult it is for me to write. But the publisher of the Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media has hit on something that may, in fact, help clean up the freewheeling world of Internet intellectual property theft.

Frederick has tasked a company called Righthaven to file dozens of lawsuits against website owners who lift and post entire or huge passages of R-J stories without authorization. Righthaven buys the copyright from Stephens Media, then pursues damages. While some site proprietors claim all they did was link to the R-J’s website, most of the evidence in court filings indicate they reproduced entire articles.

That, you see, is called stealing. And while those who dislike the R-J’s editorial views or feel personally assaulted are crying that they’re Davids being extorted by Goliath, the fact is I’ve got no more right to steal from Walmart than I do from your sister’s crafts shop.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com.

LVRJ.Com: New Lipstick, Old Pig

So I open my dead-tree paper today and there's a prominent notification on the front page above the fold alerting me that the Review-Journal's website has been redesigned! There's even a full page in the back of the A section of the paper devoted to how it's all so different and better and schnazzy. It must be if they've got good ole Nate Tannenbaum point out its features, right?

Aww, Jeez, I thought. This is going to take a chunk out of my morning assessing for this blog.

But then, of course, it didn't! And why not? Well, folks, while the R-J has redesigned its front page, it hasn't really redesigned ANY OTHER PART OF THE SITE. In fact, in some places the design is actually more spastic, glitchy and unreadable than ever. It also doesn't appear they've actually deployed real journalists with real news judgment to manage it. We'll get back to that momentarily.

So let's first start with the happy news. The front page that greets visitors is definitely an improvement. To remind you what it used to be like, let's compare side by side the old and then the new:


OK, so the navigation from the front is cleaner and easier. No longer will I have to wade all over the place hoping to locate a certain columnist or blog. I like the tabs to the latest in various categories and I suppose putting the Top 10 "most popular" stories under the Buzzworthy click makes some sense.

These drop-down menus are a good help:


In Nate Tannenbaum's online video explaining the new orientation, he seems to imply those drop-downs already existed. That's possible. I've long since actually gone to the R-J site to find anything. I just use Google and get to what I need. Now I might come here and go this route.

But as you drill down, the whole thing goes awry. That Most Popular list, for example. What measure are they using? Page views? Most E-mailed? Most Comments? Because any way you dice it, the list is bullshit. LOOK at it:


You expect anyone to believe that the most popular story on this website is a 5-day-old report on Harry Reid criticizing the American Bar Association? Ahh, but the entire list is from pieces that posted prior to Feb. 13! Nothing's happened since then to capture anyone's interest? Really?

And hey! Check this out! In the 10 minutes since I took the screenshot above, some of the rankings have changed! Apparently, that syndicated column by J.C. Watts from Feb. 7 that was at No. 4 is, um, now No. 8.


Sorry, J.C., but folks in Vegas are just ravenous for 4-day-old crime stories! Tough business, huh? Bad dog food indeedy!

The R-J is wrapping itself in self-congratulations but, really, they didn't change anything else. If you're looking to browse general or older news, you're still stuck with this stupid, alphabetic dump of headlines:


And remember what I said about real journalists applying real news judgment? Look what qualifies as BREAKING NEWS:


The shooting is fine, but a feature about vendors showing up for the MAGIC convention? Stop the presses. No, really. That's BIG.

If you want a good, fun scare, click here and wait for peek-a-boo Nate to dash on the screen like Colbert racing to his interview set. Oh, actually, don't bother. Here, I'll save you the hassle:


Ahhh!

Sadly, this 4-minute tutorial is probably going to do more harm than good. The imbeciles who need it -- and they really assume every one of you is a total moron -- will be confused by watching Nate on a life-sized version of the site, using his finger to click on stuff. They'll be so frustrated poking at their computer screens!

One of the things Nate is proud of is the new-and-improved search bar. I tried it. I wanted to see if there were any articles about President George W. Bush visiting the R-J's editorial board back when he was in power. Shermy Frederick today taunted President Obama to do so after Shermy fully established that his editorial page's voice had completely and utterly no sway in the 2008 election.

But I was just curious whether any recent sitting president had come to this particularly irrelevant lion's den or if this was just another gambit by Shermy to get on Fox News. I may never know because the search failed to help me. Also, I couldn't even read what I was typing into it, see?


My search bar type worked on the FRONT page, though, see:


It just doesn't work right on any of the interior pages. Try it! I never did find that piece on Bush ever chillin' with Vin and Shermy, but it must've happened because Shermy couldn't possibly set himself up for exposure as a total hypocrite, could he?

The glitches are the story all throughout the site. Click on this screen shot and check out this mess of a page, taken in two parts:


The type is all over the place, there are meaningless links, the boxes have no air to set off the content. This is NOT new to Web graphics. They wouldn't print it in the paper like this, would they?

Which brings me to my favorite part. The "Online Guy" Al Gibes undoubtedly oversaw this silliness. And the same "Online Guy" Al Gibes had a blog item just two days ago that somehow did NOT burn its way up his Ten 10 Most Popular list in which he took NBC to task.

"Dear NBC, This is 2010. The information age. The era of instant updates. Please get with it!"

OK, Al. You asked for it. Before you start spouting off at ANYONE for failing to get with the times, you manage probably the most archaic and idiotic news website in the nation. You have improved the front page to, say, 2006 standards and decided to throw yourself a party? Your site's video quality is still ridiculous and provides no embedding capability. Your most-popular list is clearly broken. You have no audio or video podcast feeds, your bloggers don't write on weekends, holidays or late at night and your latest column is about some no-name online dating service?!? Are you really in any position to lecture other media about modernism?

Oh, and one more thing. Nate...


...please wear darker shirts. I've asked you before. This is just fug.

P.S. Also, Nate, you've only been in town for possibly my whole lifetime. How about learning to say the name of the state properly?

A Guvmint Handout The R-J Loves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R-J Publisher Grabs Headlines; Others Annoyed

Nobody can accuse me of sucking up to R-J Publisher Sherm Frederick. I have spent many a blog post pointing out when he's lied about circulation figures and questioning how oblivious and arrogant he is about the ongoing disaster that is his website.

But.

On Sunday, he wrote a column about an incident in which an R-J ad boss was told by Sen. Harry Reid: "I hope you go out of business." The paper's editorial writers haven't been too kind to Harry, least of all Frederick himself.

That column has received an enormous amount of attention, with links from Drudge and The New York Times as well as lots of yapping on Fox News. And rightfully so. It was a ridiculous statement for a powerful U.S. senator to make, especially given the condition of the overall economy and the print media. For all the press-bashing coming from the right, I've never once heard a prominent right-wing politician state out loud, "I wish The New York Times would go out of business." Ever.

Yesterday, Las Vegas Sun columnist Jon Ralston attempted to take apart Frederick's moment of attention in his daily e-mail newsletter under the headline: "Great Marketer, Horrible Journalist, Clumsy Demagogue." He asked: "Was this just a shameless, disingenuous and pathetic cry for attention (please, please read the RJ) using a polarizing national figure to do so? Or was this a sincere concern about a powerful senator threatening to put a newspaper out of business?"

I agree with Ralston that Frederick, in his piece, framed the Reid remark as a "threat" when really it wasn't one. He didn't say, "I'm going to see that you're shut down." It was an inappropriate opinion; Reid now says it was a joke so if so it was an inappropriate joke. The most powerful senator in the nation should not be running around expressing (or even harboring, frankly) a hope that the media ought to be stifled and that hundreds of people should lose their jobs just because he's feeling assaulted by some of its writers. As journalists, that should be instinctively offensive.

Yet Ralston went too far here. I honestly don't believe that Frederick wrote his piece to increase readership in some permanent way. I think he felt he had a good, provocative topic and that's what columnists are supposed to exploit. Ralston, too, writes provocative columns (as do I), but I doubt he does so with a calculation of how much national ink he might receive or whether more people will buy the paper that day. That's the cliche about reporters; people in journalism should know better. If Frederick thinks one column is going to change the fortunes of his publication, he's foolish, but I don't believe he thinks that.

This particular passage of Ralston's I found weird:

"Today, Frederick is bragging on his blog about the thousands of responses. He may honestly think that thousands of people read his column. He may not understand that the column, for obvious reasons, was linked by Drudge, thus generating that volume of response. He may actually be that obtuse - history and my own experience says he is. But it is the national media attention - even The New York Times blogged about it and Fox News is understandably orgasmic - that generated the response on the RJ site."

Well, hold on a second. Why so dismissive of garnering links from major publications? Why is that somehow an invalid means of increased readership? Does Ralston himself not make note when he gets into the national press? If his site gets more traffic when he's on "Rachel Maddow," does he shrug it off or find it gratifying? Could it not also be said that Ralston was attempting, by firing off such a harsh assault, to stick his own head into the spotlight that Frederick has obtained in this instance? And if so, isn't that just how this game is played by folks on every side of the spectrum?

It also struck me as strange for Ralston, later in the piece, to attack the R-J's news pages for significant bias against Reid. They extensively covered the publicity stunt/re-election effort known as a Green Energy Summit recently, for instance, and for a so-called right-wing paper they've given fairly even-handed and prominent coverage to President Obama. Sure, they're covering Reid's foibles, too; he's a very controversial and undeniably locally unpopular figure and if the coverage didn't reflect that it would be inaccurate.

Furthermore, I've been friends with both former political writer Molly Ball and current one Ben Spillman and I find them both to be painstakingly fair and sincere journalists. I doubt, for instance, that Molly and Sherm would agree on much of anything politically, knowing her as I have, and that's saying something. If he were vetting his political writers for biases that line up with his own, he's doing a lousy job.

No publication -- especially in this city -- gets a pass on ideological purity in its news or editorial pages. I'm totally with Ralston that the R-J has failed to cover the Sen. John Ensign sex scandal with the gusto it deserves, but there are other stories that the R-J owns that the Sun hasn't addressed and plenty that I've broken that neither paper has touched. And the Sun certainly has its political biases that absolutely do bleed through from time to time in the way pieces are conceived, written and displayed. Because writers are given more liberties at the Sun and allowed to be more analytical, I submit it probably happens more at the Sun -- and that's OK, because the Sun has created a niche for itself that allows for that.

To clarify and summarize: Yes, Frederick was exploiting the situation. No, Reid didn't "threaten." But yes, Reid deserved to be called out for the remark any which way because the remark was the biggest sin of all that transpired here.

Odd LV Sun, Great Penn Jillette On Gays

The Las Vegas Sun offers up a strange editorial today urging Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons to sign a bill that's already passed the Nevada Legislature creating a domestic partnership registry for unwed straight and unable-to-wed gay couples along with a suite of legal protections that have cost Miles and me thousands of dollars in legal fees to merely approximate. It's great that they feel that way -- I don't pretend to be impartial in this topic since it is all about my own personal legal status -- but the Sun's editorial is awkward on a few accounts:

1. The best that can be realistically hoped for is that Gibbons doesn't veto it and/or that two lawmakers in each house of the Legislature reverse their votes to sustain an override. The divorcing governor has already said he would defend the sanctity of the institution of marriage that he has personally repeatedly defaced with a veto. So urging him to sign it is like the Wall Street Journal urging Obama to appoint Sam Alito's ideological twin to the Supreme Court. It's a waste of ink and a waste of an opportunity to frame the debate in any new way.

2. The piece claims that the bill would make gay partners "eligible for health care benefits if employers provide them." Somebody over there didn't read the papers; they scrapped that provision before it even passed the state Senate about two weeks ago.

3. The paper also claims that "what the bill does is to treat domestic partners as first-class citizens." Well, no. It treats these couples as, roughly, third-class citizens. First class would be marriage equality. Second class would be marriage equality under another name to satisfy those linguistic zealots who believe semantics are more important than the lives of real human beings. But this is the best gays can hope for at the moment around here. Does the Sun actually think that separate and clearly unequal is "first class?"

Despite these flaws, several gay leaders are circulating this inaccurate and uninteresting editorial this morning, which surprises nobody by appearing in the town's left-of-center newspaper. Yet so far as I can tell, not a single activist passed around R-J Publisher Sherm Frederick's far more compelling and convincing Sunday piece in which he actually argued for full marriage equality for gays. When support comes from unexpected quarters and is argued in unexpected ways that actually provides a chance to persuade people who need persuading, that would seem like something to tout.

While we're on a gay kick this morning, I'm not a fan of Penn Jillette for a myriad of reasons. But he took on Glenn Beck earlier this week on Fox News and the results were quite entertaining:



Hat tip to John Katsilometes at the Sun for his very entertaining summary of the Jillette-Beck exchange.

Elaine Wynn: "I'm doing just great."

OK, that's a sneaky headline. It implies I had a discussion with her about the possibilities of a divorce, which I did not explicitly have. But I did interview her yesterday for a profile of a significant Wynn figure I'm writing and, as always, there was some fun runoff material that doesn't belong in my story. I'll get to the "I'm doing great" part in a sec.

First, though, one fun bit arose from a recent comment I had made on VegasPBS' Nevada Week in Review a few weeks back. (I'll be on again this weekend, FYI.) The panel was discussing the Republicans' problem finding a candidate of stature to go up against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid next year despite his abysmal popularity rating in Nevada. For some reason, I offhandedly mentioned Elaine Wynn and then later realized she'd actually be a formidable candidate and senator. She is, after all:

(a) a lifelong Republican with significant ties to President Obama
(b) a successful, fiscally conservative businesswoman
(c) someone with significant means and name recognition and
(d) someone who may be looking for something else to do if she is divorcing her husband or needing some time apart.

Might Mrs. Wynn follow the Mrs. Clinton route and strike out on her own? I think she'd scare the crap out of the Democrats. Heck, she'd scare the crap out of Nevada Republicans, too.

So I inquired as to whether she'd ever run for office. She said no, that she feels she has more influence in her charity work which revolves largely around disadvantaged youths via Communities in Schools, of which she's national chairwoman. But here's part of the discussion:

Elaine Wynn: I wouldn’t consider running for office. It’s too rigorous and, in this day and age, it’s too unkind. I wouldn’t want to subject myself to the unpleasant part of it. And then most of the time you’re working in committees and you're compromising. I’m a leader. I’d run for governor before I ran for the Senate. [long pause] But I wouldn’t do that! So don’t get any ideas!

Friess: Well, you’re a Republican and the Republicans don’t seem to have anybody to run against Harry Reid.

Wynn: I would never run against Harry Reid. I think it would be stupid for our state to run anyone against Harry Reid. I think we have the most powerful person in the Senate and despite what one’s political persuasions might be, the state of Nevada benefits greatly from him being where he is. Anybody who’s thinking otherwise is not sophisticated.

Yowza! I wonder if she's speaking specifically of people like Review-Journal publisher Sherm Frederick, who has been on a jihad against Reid for years now. And to think Sherm tried to gin up his sophistication cred recently by (apologetically) explaining to readers how he loves arthouse flicks. Foiled again!

I spoke to Mrs. Wynn by phone from her home in Sun Valley, Idaho, and asked if she was feeling any post-opening blues. Her response:

I feel like I’ve done my final exams, I turned in my term paper, I got an A and now I’m on vacation. It feels fabulous. I went to the grocery store today! I went to the stationery store and bought envelopes. I’m back in the real world again. I’m with my grandchildren. ... I know it sounds ridiculous being a billionaire, but I love the simple things in life.

Of course I wanted to ask directly about the possible divorce and the other woman, but I did not because there is something about the dignity of this woman that makes even someone as intrusive and shameless as I am want to behave yourself. So instead, I asked this ambiguous question near the end of the chat and I sensed she knew what I was asking:

Friess: You’re doing OK?

Wynn: Yeah, I’m doing great, I’m doing just great. I’m very excited and anxious for the next chapter in the company and I’ve started visiting my CiS sites. I went to Chicago, I went to North Carolina. ... I’ve only been chairman for one year of this organization and the first year there was a high learning curve and so now I’m getting out in the network. But I’m living in Las Vegas and I intend to remain active in the company and that won’t change.

That last sentence seemed to be key. If it weren't for the talk of the possible divorce, I find it hard to imagine she'd even address whether she'd be living in Las Vegas or continue to "remain active in the company."

I did wonder, since Elaine gave that statement to Norm saying "there will only be one person that will occupy the villa and that will be Mr. Wynn," if they had more than one home in Vegas. She said no, they only have the villa at Wynn Las Vegas. So they're both living in Las Vegas and they have but one residence. Could all this divorce talk be malarky or premature?

What seems very, very clear is that she's focusing on her life and that the cutthroat nastiness of high-profile divorce that the gossip press loves to stew in is fairly unlikely to emerge here no matter how much the New York Post hopes so. For those of you nervous that an internecine squabble could damage the company and the only gaming company whose stock has maintained any semblance of value, the vibe I got was that that's not going to happen.

Oh! And one more interesting remark. This one gives you just the right sense of how this woman thinks, how optimistic she is. She sees a silver lining on all this economic misery. Sayeth Elaine:

The bargain hunters are getting great deals now, but I think later when things do normalize, that they’ll remember what good times they had and they’ll come back. They’ll pay a little more money but they’ll come back. And they’ll have been exposed to something they might not have had a chance to be exposed to before. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

So the current criminally low-priced Vegas is . . . a loss leader for the future of Vegas! Hooray!

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!