"All the news that's fit to click"

Put down the newspaper. The next wave of Nevada journalism is online

BY ANDREW KIRALY

When does a blogger know he's no longer a lone voice crying in the wilderness of the Web? A pissy e-mail from a Jim Gibbons for Governor campaign lackey certainly helps. When it landed in the inbox of Hugh Jackson, editor of the Las Vegas Gleaner (lasvegasgleaner.com), the unapologetic lefty couldn't help but smile.

"It's a stupid little thing, but I think it's really cool that the Gibbons campaign sent me a letter," says Jackson, who had miffed the Gibbons camp by interviewing one of his primary opponents in the gubernatorial race, Sen. Bob Beers.

When a big campaign machine stoops to splash in the blogstream with a new, relatively obscure online journal, you can practically smell the paradigm shift. In Southern Nevada, Hugh Jackson is at the center of it. Okay, he's a guy holed up in a Green Valley apartment whose site logs a modest 1,000 visitors a week; but in other ways, the angry little website has made a big blip on the media radar. Since launching in mid-June, the Las Vegas Gleaner has quickly become an indispensable big-picture guide to Southern Nevada politics -- from a progressive point of view, heavily salted with Jackson's downbeat humor. Political junkies are reading it; newspaper reporters refer to it for doses of insta-punditry (whether they credit the Gleaner or not); the ubiquitous Jon Ralston frequently links to it in his e-mail newsletter; and it looms ever-larger in the minds of campaign consultants and politicians. Jackson's brand of what he calls "attack journalism" isn't your typical blog fare of sanctified shrillness; there's substance and subtlety to his approach.

"I'm biased, but I'm fair," he says. "Everybody knows where I'm coming from, what my views are, but I am going to be fair. As I say in the Gleaner, balance is not a priority, but accuracy and honesty are priorities." Even his ideological opponents get the idea. "As far as I can tell, a fair amount of my readership is coming from people who probably don't adhere to most of my views."

Once derided as the Internet's version of the vanity press, weblogs have long since proved as persistent as that loathsome punch-the-monkey pop-up ad. Though blogs and their Web-based brethren are as mainstream as nose piercings and e-trading these days, only now are those media taking on meaningful form in your neighborhood. Some heavy talents in Southern Nevada have caught a whiff of the opportunities of Internet media, whether it's blogging, podcasting, or "push e-mail" political newsletters.

For prolific freelance journalist Steve Friess, new media has offered the opportunity to pursue classic journalism. His online radio show, "Las Vegas S&M" (www.lvrocks.com/sm.html) showcases a format that's seeing an unlikely revival in click-or-miss-it cyberspace: the long-form radio interview. On his show, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m., Friess uses his high profile as a national journalist to land hard-to-get interviews. You can even hear Jennifer Garner wax philosophical, or Steve Wynn throw a tantrum while giving Friess a personal tour of his new megaresort.

"I'm not looking for a quick-and-dirty interview," says Friess, who's done six shows. "These are 20-, 30-minute interviews where they're really talking about their lives. There's an opportunity to do some real journalism with this, and I believe really strongly there's a huge audience out there for this." It's an audience that doesn't have to be tuned in every Thursday; you can download a podcast at any time to, say, relive the glory of a casino mogul's hissy fit.

Radio might be the last medium that Jon Ralston hasn't conquered. The pundit with a proclivity toward lexiconic exertion recently launched his own blog (http://vegaspundit.typepad.com), where Ralston supplements an already overflowing plate that includes daily e-mail political newsletter RalstonFlash, a column in In Business, "Face to Face" and a Sun column. But Ralston clearly thinks cyberspace is the place to punditize.

"When I started with the Greenspun empire more than five years ago, one of the things Danny Greenspun said to me was, 'Pretty soon you're not going to be publishing the Ralston Report [on paper].' I said, 'You're nuts.' And now the Ralston Report no longer exists in printed form."

But to some, Web-based reporting is less about form than content -- content whose responsibility is to rattle the complacency of the corporate media.

Says Jackson: "As recently as, say, a year ago, and certainly before the election, in polling you had the majority of people in the country believing that Saddam Hussein was responsible for Sept. 11, that weapons of mass destruction were to be found in Iraq. And these people, if they knew that Saddam had not been behind Sept. 11 and there were no weapons of mass destruction, wouldn't be voting for Bush, and they would have thought the war was a bad idea.

"Clearly, the mainstream media dropped the ball somewhere."

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