Pandemic has killed more Las Vegas folks per capita than rest of U.S.

Posted on by April 5, 2021
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Pandemic in Las Vegas

1918 Las Vegas newspaper headline

At the one-year anniversary of the national pandemic shutdown, the image-makers of Las Vegas are working mightily to lure back the visitors who have avoided Sin City like the, ah, plague.

PR types are apparently paying to fly in “social influencers” from around the country to sing the praises of Sin City.  Officials play up the cleansing efforts of the hotels casinos. VisitLasVegas.com, an official site of the official Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, even has a page linking to the sanitation policies of individual resorts.

However, one thing not exactly being stressed here is the hard fact that the overall death rate from coronavirus in the Las Vegas area is worse than the national average. True, numbers are moving in a good direction here and elsewhere. But all that scrubbing in Las Vegas has not yet produced a decided advantage.

There is an eerie parallel to what happened hereabouts during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.

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With the Adelsons selling Las Vegas properties, what about the Review-Journal?

Posted on by March 12, 2021
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Review-JournalNow that tycoon Sheldon Adelson has died at age 87, his family-controlled Las Vegas Sands Corp. has announced the sale of its local hotel and convention properties for a whopping $6.25 billion. The only thing left with the family here in town will be the Las Vegas Review-Journal, bought in 2015 at a price so exorbitant that it prompted speculation it was purchased partly as an insurance policy to keep a lid on unflattering local coverage.

But with the Adelsons abandoning their Las Vegas operations, any need for any local insurance will pass. Which raises the question: What kind of a future does the RJ have?

This is all sheer speculation by me. But the overall problems nationally in the newspaper industry were well known even before the pandemic removed much paid advertising. Right up the road, Salt Lake City lost the daily print edition of both its daily newspapers on January 1. Here in Las Vegas I imagine there are large financial losses–the RJ‘s print circulation has dropped something like 70% in six years to maybe 70,000 now. So it’s not hard to envision a dramatic change in the paper’s ownership or operation. Continue reading →

It Didn’t Stay Here: guilty in Tacoma for spending in Las Vegas

Posted on by August 28, 2021
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spending in Las VegasSee update at end of story

Sitting in the considerable shadow of just-up-the-road Seattle, Tacoma, Wash., nevertheless is noteworthy for a couple of things. In the late 19th century it grandly styled itself “City of Destiny,” a nickname that still persists although the town never really lived up to that hype. There’s the spectacular 1940 collapse just four months after its opening of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge over Puget Sound, at the time the world’s third-longest suspension bridge. The city gets second billing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, but at least it’s a major, well-known facility. With a population of 218,000, Tacoma is bigger than all but 100 other U.S. cities.

Recently, Tacoma, seat of Pierce County, was the site of a big crime. Nearly $7 million was pilfered from the Pierce County Housing Authority by Cova Campbell, the agency’s long-time finance director. It’s been called the biggest embezzlement of public funds in Washington State history.

Why, you might ask, is this of any interest to the New To Las Vegas world headquarters? I’m going to let you guess where some of the stolen loot was spent.

Yes, Campbell becomes the newest candidate for my list, It Didn’t Stay Here. This is a gallery of folks who got into trouble someplace else for something that happened in Las Vegas (in this instance, the spending of ill-gotten gain in that bug light of iniquity also known as Sin City). The roster is a refutation of “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” for many years the famous promotional slogan of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The full list can be found elsewhere on this page. Continue reading →

In Las Vegas, like elsewhere, owning the newspaper helps ensure a nice obituary

Posted on by January 21, 2021
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… and Hearst, 1951

Sheldon Adelson

Adelson, 2021 …

Want to have a nice, expansive newspaper obituary written about you after your death? It helps to own the newspaper.

The day after Las Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson died last week at age 87, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which his family owns, ran what it called a “10-page special section” behind a color photo taking up half the front page. I imagine no paper in the world beyond, perhaps, the two his family owns in Israel devoted more space to Adelson’s passing. It more than reminded me of the over-the-top play Hearst newspapers gave chain founder William Randolph Hearst, the flamboyant inspiration for Orson Welles’ famous movie, “Citizen Kane,” when Hearst died in 1951 at age 88. I’ll get back to this in a bit.

By contrast, the death a few days after Adelson’s of Siegfried Fischbacher, the 81-year-old remaining survivor of the wildly successful, long-running Las Vegas tiger-festooned magic act of Siegfried & Roy, warranted only three pages in the RJ. But even that was a lot more than the coverage the RJ gave former president George H.W. Bush after he died in 2018 at age 95. Although the Cold War ended on his watch, Bush 41 received only a measly page-and-a-half in the RJ.

To me, anyway, as significant as the amount of space the RJ devoted to Adelson was the content of the copy. Judging from some of the obituaries published over the past week by other outlets not owned by the Adelson family, a certain amount of unpleasant material about the departed tycoon was left out. Continue reading →