The media issue

It's been a big year for change in the Las Vegas media.

First, longtime newspaper rivals the Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Sun culminated months of negotiations with an amendment to the longstanding joint operating agreement, which allows the same people to sell ads and deliver the paper while different people write stories, take pictures and pen editorials. Under the new arrangement, the Sun becomes an insert into the daily R-J, while still striving to maintain itself as a separate newspaper.

Former Sun scribe Bob Shemeligian takes one last long look back at the colorful history of the old Sun, starting on Page 28.

Second, new media exploded in Las Vegas. Ex-Public Citizen staffer Hugh Jackson (a former editor of CityLife and its sister publication, the Business Press) writes one of the most popular blogs, the Las Vegas Gleaner. Political commentator Jon Ralston (who helped kick off the electronic media trend by creating the venerable e-Briefing while he was a columnist at the Review-Journal) also recently took up blogging. They're profiled by Managing Editor Andrew Kiraly on the facing page.

Third, longtime "State of Nevada" host Gwen Castaldi bids farewell to Nevada, and to the show she created on KNPR 89.5-FM. In her stead comes Dave Berns, former Review-Journal writer and Business Press editor and publisher. Berns will host the program Monday through Thursday, and Review-Journal reporter Erin Neff will take the mike on Fridays. Emmily Bristol delves into that story on Page 32.

KLAS Channel 8 Vice President of News Bob Stoldal is a man who has seen his share of changes in Las Vegas. He shares his views on the state of local media with CityLife News Editor Matt O'Brien on Page 26.

And finally, by way of full disclosure, the last big media change of 2005: CityLife was purchased this year by the Stephens Media Group, owners of the Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Mercury, an alternative weekly founded by former CityLife Editor Geoff Schumacher. The Mercury was folded into CityLife in March. CityLife maintains an uneasy relationship with the Review-Journal, occasionally poking the big paper in the eye with the sharp stick of media criticism. Then again, in the fine tradition of alternative weeklies like The Village Voice and the Phoenix New Times, keeping the daily papers honest is part of our job.

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."

What about Bob?

Channel 8's Bob Stoldal on surfing beagles, Hank Greenspun and his high hopes for TV news

BY MATT O'BRIEN

Traditionally, Las Vegas has served as a way station for journalists. They train here, build up their resumes and then jump to bigger media outlets in bigger markets. Hell, who can blame them?

There are, however, a handful of journalists who have planted roots in the desert soil. Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith has been around forever. So has Sun columnist Jeff German. And then there's Bob Stoldal, KLAS Channel 8's vice president of news and Las Vegas ONE's general manager. Dude actually worked for Howard Hughes.

Recently, we sat down with Stoldal at his northwest valley home and asked him a whole bunch of questions. A slightly edited version of the interview appears below.

CityLife: In 1968, Howard Hughes bought Channel 8 from Hank Greenspun. You were a KLAS reporter and anchor at the time. Give us a good Hughes story.

Bob Stoldal: I would get phone calls on a regular basis from a Hughes aide saying that Mr. Hughes was watching the newscast and wanted more information on this story or that story. So it became a regular process where a security guard would bring over an old, massive, reel-to-reel recorder and I would gather whatever extra information there was and read it into the recorder. Then the security guard would take it to Hughes. It was flat-out exciting to know that Hughes was watching and that he wanted more information about your story.

CL: What do you remember most about Hank Greenspun?

BS: I liked Hank. I liked Hank a lot. But you have to realize that a lot of my heroes don't walk on water. Quite frankly, they often skate on thin ice. Hank was great for this town, perfect. He yelled at me on a regular basis, but it was never personal. It was like being yelled at by a member of your family. I think that is how a lot of people who worked for Hank took it. I wish he were still alive. He would be a great value to the community.

CL: If he were still alive, what would he think about the Sun becoming an insert in the R-J?

BS: [Long pause] I think Hank was in many ways a pragmatist, but he was also an idealist. I think he would understand it, but he certainly would've preferred that the R-J be inside the Sun.

CL: How has local TV news changed since you got into the business in the 1960s?

BS: It's much more competitive. When I got into the business, there were three television stations in town that did local news. Now you have local news on Channel 3, Channel 5, Channel 8, Channel 13 and Channel 14. You have the WB. You have six stations that do news. You can see local news from about 5 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. The viewer has more choices. It's become much more competitive in that sense.

Also, I think television news slumped in the 1990s. It became what I call surfing-beagle stories, the squirrels that can surf, those kind of odd bits of television that are interesting but not important. I think we stopped being important to viewers. But I think that has changed in the last four or five years. I think the local television marketplace is once again maturing.

CL: Local news still has a reputation of being light and fluffy. Is that reputation deserved?

BS: Who has given it that reputation? It's the print media. There is an inherent bias by the people in the print media who report on television news. On the other hand, all the things reported about TV news are true to some extent -- but they are not true of all television news. All television news is not Geraldo Rivera. All television news is not Sean Hannity. All television news is not Bill O'Reilly. But people speak of television news in a broad sense.

But I think you are seeing and will see more enterprise reporting. I pick up the morning paper sometimes -- and I have several friends over there, at least before this interview -- and I'm done with it in about three or four minutes. There is a lack of depth in the morning paper some times. Other times, there is wonderful stuff in it. So I think the newspaper industry is also going through radical changes, trying to figure out what it's going to be.

CL: So the rumor that local TV stations get all their news from the R-J is greatly exaggerated?

BS: I think that on any given day that the Sun or the R-J has a major story, the television stations have two choices: Ignore it or follow it. But you have to look at what the newspapers are doing as major stories these days and see how many of those stories find their way into the newscasts. Five years ago, there were probably more that appeared in the newscasts than today.

CL: Are the dailies following the newscasts on many stories?

BS: No, but that's because they are a little imperial. It would be beneath them to do that. There are any number of stories that local television stations generate and that have news value that don't find their way into the papers.

CL: Compare Channel 8's newscasts to Channel 3 and 13's.

BS: In the past, Channel 13 has looked to find any niche it could. The investigative, traditional, New York Times reporting -- that's who Channel 8 is. I know that Channel 13 has done research and said, "Don't go after that niche. It's already taken." So they have gone after consumerism and sensationalism. They have gone after a number of things to try to find something that will gather a particular audience. I don't know where they are going now. They were "Action News." I'm not quite sure what that means, but that's what they were.

Channel 3 has been a number of things, but it's primarily been NBC. It's primarily been "Wheel of Fortune." It's primarily been "Jeopardy!" It's primarily been Dr. Phil and Katie Couric. It puts its newscasts in between those shows and it's been successful. They are a pretty clean operation, sort of middle of the road. In the past, they have had a reputation of being a little fluffy. I don't think they're as fluffy as they were, but they are pretty middle-of-the-road.

CL: You are or have been active in a number of local organizations, including the Centennial Celebration Commission and the Clark County School District. Does this present a conflict of interest?

BS: That's something that is always there. That question always has to be asked. It hangs over me and it's a light I put on everything I do, but there have been very few times where it has been a conflict. I'm there representing the community, not Channel 8.

Beyond that, if somebody screws up, the story is going to be reported on our newscast. These organizations know that and the news department knows that. But I've been doing this since 1968 and it's still a question I constantly ask myself. I think about it all the time and it does bother me, but it's not like I'm part of the Gaming Commission or the PUC [Public Utilities Commission]. I'm a community member and I like to be a part of it.

CL: I think a lot of journalists would like to be more involved in their community, but they worry about conflicts of interest. What advice would you give them?

BS: I would advise them to keep struggling, to keep asking questions. The answers can only come from two places. It can come from the employer. What are their rules? What are their standards? What are their guidelines? The other answers come from you. Can you set up a process where you are comfortable being a member of an organization and also being a journalist? I just don't think you can disassociate yourself and have this out-of-community experience.

CL: Channel 8 anchor Polly Gonzalez died earlier this year in a car accident. How has the station dealt with her death?

BS: You can ask anyone in that department who was there and they will still have to pause and gather their thoughts. It's still a difficult thing for us. The community rallied around her family and the station. Her little girls -- well, fortunately, Polly had a large family. Her brother is moving to Las Vegas. Their father is with them, but it's sad. I keep hearing these Dr. Phils of the world talking about closure. There is no closure. There is just a softening of the emotions, but it never goes away.

Matt O'Brien is CityLife's news editor. He can be reached at 871-6780 ext. 350 or obrien@lvpress.com.

Back in the day

Typewriters, cigarettes and booze kept the old Las Vegas Sun going

BY BOB SHEMELIGIAN

The old Las Vegas Sun newsroom on Martin Luther King Boulevard was a dirty, smoky, noisy place where journalists worked long hours for low wages. They hammered out stories on primitive computers that often broke down. They dined on cold-cut sandwiches from a mobile lunch wagon nicknamed the "Yuk Truck" or "Roach Coach."

And today, without exception, they say they wouldn't trade those years for anything.

"You never knew what was going to happen next," says Chris Chrystal, a former county government reporter and city editor. "I remember once when this guy walked into the newsroom with a machete and he threatened the city editor [Dave Grubnick] because he was upset about a story that ran in the paper. Can you imagine sitting at your desk and all of a sudden a guy with a big sword is threatening to cut your head off?"

Sun founder and editor Herman "Hank" Greenspun quickly appeared, talked the would-be assailant into putting the sword down, and then walked the man out of the newsroom.

Such incidents not only endeared staffers to their publisher, they taught reporters to be fearless because they had the power of the newspaper and its publisher behind them.

"Hank bailed reporters out of trouble," said Myram Borders, former UPI bureau manager, whose office was in the Sun building. "I remember when Chris Chrystal got into a confrontation with hotel security guards because she was trying to file a story on a group of astronauts who were visiting. Well, Hank arrived, got in the middle of it, and got her out of there. He was very protective of his staff."

Chrystal, now media relations manager for the Nevada Commission on Tourism, said working for Greenspun was like "hanging onto the tail of a comet."

"Hank was one of the most dynamic and gutsy people I ever met," Chrystal said. "He was fearless. There was nothing you could do to shake his self-confidence or determination. Nothing scared him. Not even the IRS."

Gary Thompson, a former Sun managing editor, agreed: "I remember one of the first stories I worked on. The headline was, 'The Sun Audits the IRS.' This shows you the chutzpah of Hank. At the time, the IRS was conducting these audits of toke earners ... and I recall walking into the office of the IRS with a waitress and her husband, who was a casino dealer, and I plunked down a tape recorder on the agent's desk, and he told me it was illegal to tape the meeting and I asked him to show me the law [against tape recorders] in the IRS code. Well, he couldn't, but he did terminate the interview."

Thompson, now director of sports and entertainment for Harrah's Entertainment, said he loved working at the Sun, "although I don't miss the money." But others point out that no one who worked at the Sun should have expected a good salary.

"Hank paid nothing," said former Sun sports editor John L. Smith, who today is an Review-Journal columnist. "His unofficial motto was: 'I gave you a break when I hired you. A gas pump jockey could do your job.' And a favorite lead from a Hank column was, 'No man ever drowned in his own sweat.' It was written about the complainers in the newsroom who wanted raises."

For the reporters who were single, it was a little easier to get by on meager earnings. Caryn Shetterly, who covered education in the early 1980s, cared so little about her salary, she once found a Sun paycheck underneath her couch cushion. It had been there for months.

"They didn't have direct deposit back then," joked Shetterly, who today is a crime analyst at the El Paso County (Colorado) Sheriff's Office. "We didn't work there for the money, and for me, working there was my whole life."

Still, getting by on the Sun salary was difficult for many reporters -- especially those with families. "It was tough, because times were tough at the Sun," said Jim Barrows, who worked as a reporter, columnist and editor at the Sun for several decades. "I got $125 a week as city editor in the late '60s. Not much money, but every day was an experience."

And, if things got too tough, well, there was always a chance an angel would appear.

"I remember once there was a young reporter who had this old broken down Volkswagen, and it had given up the ghost in the middle of the summer, and she at the end of her rope with no money, and she was sitting in the newsroom crying. Her face was red because she was so hot and exasperated," Chrystal said. "All of a sudden Barbara [Greenspun, Hank Greenspun's wife] appeared in the newsroom and asked, 'What's the matter?' Barbara took the young woman out to a car dealership and bought her a brand new baby blue VW bug."

For the most part, though, Sun reporters and photographers drove heaps to assignments, took notes with cheap pens, and raced back to the newsroom to gulp coffee and smoke cigarettes and hammer out copy.

"There were clouds of smoke and coffee-stains everywhere," said former Sun reporter Lark Ellen Gould. "And those old tubes with the slimy keys, because so many people used them, and those gut-filled copy editors who would just swish into their seats and swell their chairs."

"It was a fun building," Borders said. "You never knew what was going to happen next. And the staff acted like newspaper reporters rather than business executives. They had the freedom to think for themselves and scout out their own stuff. The newsroom was definitely a working area in disarray with people writing stories on typewriters and ripping paper out. In those days, reporters ate, dressed and looked the way they wanted to. If they were coming off a flood story in flak jackets and muddy boots, and they had to go to City Hall to cover a meeting, they went dressed that way."

And staffers didn't think twice about pulling a joke on the old man.

"One time Barbara was complaining about a picture in the weekend edition of a young woman in a bathing suit, and an editor had a dummy paper made up with a front page that showed a full frontal nude shot of a showgirl and they delivered it to Hank's house," Barrows said. "He got a real kick out of it."

Such pranks took the edge off the daily fierce competition between the Sun and R-J.

"It was a scoop mentality," said former copy and news editor Mike Donahue. "It was just the way any two-newspaper town should be. We tried to scoop them, and they tried to scoop us, and if you got scooped, then you'd run out and find the people on the other side of the story and come up with something new -- and fast."

Tom Bruny, vice president of marketing for the Fontainebleu Resort in Miami Beach, Fla., was a Sun reporter and editor in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He still remembers the competition.

"At that time, the circulation of the two papers was fairly close, and it was very competitive and very intense," Bruny said. "I still remember that sense of dread we had every day when the R-J came out because we were so scared we might have missed something and gotten beat on a story."

Indeed, competing beat reporters would do almost anything to get a good story -- even collaborate.

This happened in the early '70s when Chrystal was shut of a closed-door liquor and gaming license hearing at the old county courthouse on East Carson Street. With her was Jerry Ralya, an R-J reporter. "Jerry and I were desperate to find out what was being said at that meeting, and I had a stethoscope, but the only place where I could hear anything was a cracked seam where the wall met the ceiling," said Chrystal, who found a stepladder and enlisted the help of her competitor to get the story.

"I had to climb the top and stand on tip-toe holding up this stethoscope with both hands, and I would whisper what was said inside the meeting to Jerry, who was standing below me and taking notes, and all the while cracking jokes about looking up my skirt," Chrystal said. "He never let me forget it, and later when [District Attorney] George Franklin asked how we got the information and I told him, he just loved that story, and he cackled about it for the rest of his life."

Ralya, who like Greenspun was a law school graduate, later worked at the Sun as a court reporter and night editor. In the late 1970s, Ralya covered the "Mormon will" trial for the Sun. The will, discovered in Salt Lake City after the death of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, purported to leave one-sixteenth of Hughes' estate to Northern Nevada gas operator Melvin Dummar. Years after a Clark County jury ruled that "Mormon will" was a hoax, Ralya spoke with pride about how Greenspun awarded him a rare bonus -- his reward for diligently covering every day of the drawn out trial.

"I think it lasted six months, and we sat together day after day," Borders said. "I often joked about the fact that Hughes died of kidney failure, and we were so afraid to leave our seats for fear of missing something, that we risked the same fate."

Like Wade Cavanaugh, another gifted reporter who worked for the Sun, Ralya was an alcoholic. "Jerry, as everyone will tell you, was a better reporter drunk than the remainder of the staff was sober," Smith said.

Sobriety, however, wasn't very common in those days.

"In those days, everyone went to the bars after work," Chrystal noted. "That's where the reporters and politicians hung out. And after they had a couple of drinks, you'd find out things that you couldn't during the day. Now it's a different world. The health craze and the drunk driving laws have changed the lifestyles of the media."

Still, Ralya's drinking did lead to some delicate problems for new Sun staff members.

Geoff Schumacher, now director of community publications for the Stephens Media Group, owners of CityLife, started his journalism career in 1986 as a night police reporter at the Sun. Among his duties was serving as Ralya's designated driver.

"It had become clear that Jerry was not fit to drive home, and I was asked to take him to his apartment over by where the Venetian is today," Schumacher said. "But, as soon as we got in my car, he said, 'Why don't we stop at the Union Plaza?' "

At first, the young police reporter protested, but Ralya, who could talk the devil into attending High Mass, soon prevailed, and was dropped off at the downtown hotel.

"Well, guess who didn't show up for work the next day?" Schumacher laughed. "After that, when I took Jerry home, it was straight home."

Schumacher fondly remembers the Runyonesque characters at the Sun who smoked nasty cigars and weren't shy about drinking after work -- and sometimes during work -- and were on a first-name basis with every personality in Las Vegas from the highest-ranking politicians to eccentric homeless advocates such as John 3:16 Cook and his wife, Magickal Marissa.

One Sun executive who affected Schumacher a great deal was former Nevada Gov. Mike O'Callaghan. So commanding was O'Callaghan's presence at the Sun, he was nicknamed "Boomer."

"Mike O'Callaghan was truly bigger than life, and he was also a mentor to me," Schumacher said. "I learned a lot about journalism, politics and life from him."

Both O'Callaghan and Greenspun were extremely powerful men, with a presence on the world stage, but it was the latter that seemed to generate the most interest throughout the world. It was Greenspun who Mike Wallace dropped by to visit in 1984 when CBS' 60 Minutes was doing a story on Las Vegas.

"Hank took Mike Wallace out to lunch at the gut wagon that parked every day in front of the newspaper," Smith remembers. "The sandwiches weren't bad, and Hank and Mike acted like Chip 'n Dale. You could see they really liked each other. Wallace wore more makeup than Tammy Faye Baker."

Adds Chrystal: "When you worked for Hank, you played on the world stage. I remember one day I was looking around for Hank to ask him a question about a story, and he was nowhere to be found. Later, over the wire came a photo taken that day of Hank walking along the Nile with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Jimmy Carter."

Over the years, Greenspun and his newspaper attracted many young writers who would go on to much bigger things. Among former Sun staffers: Mike Sloan, former senior vice president of the Mandalay Resort Group, attorney Bob Faiss, chairman of the gaming law department at Lionel, Sawyer and Collins, Ed Reid, co-author of The Green Felt Jungle, and Jeff Rice, author of the original story that was made into The Night Stalker television series.

Under another publisher, perhaps the Sun would have been a little-known publication in one of the nation's smallest markets. But with Greenspun at the helm, the Sun had national and international prominence.

In 1973, Watergate burglar James W. McCord admitted the group known as the Watergate "Plumbers" had hatched a plot to steal documents from a safe in Greenspun's office at the Sun. McCord testified then-Attorney General John Mitchell had told him that the safe contained detrimental information about a Democratic candidate for president.

After former U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin demanded to see the documents, Greenspun sued and got a ruling they would remain private.

"He's [Hank Greenspun] been sued a zillion times," Donahue said. "This is a guy who [in 1947] robbed an armory in Hawaii and tried to take the guns to Israel on some freaking leaky tub of a boat," Donahue said. "You think he worried about going to court?"

Three years after Greenspun's reckless attempt to try to help the then-new nation of Israel maintain its independence, he pled guilty in a Los Angeles courtroom to violating the Neutrality Act -- a felony -- and was fined $10,000. A few minutes after the verdict, Greenspun telephoned the Sun and dictated the banner for the next day's edition: "Greenspun Guilty."

Two years later, Greenspun gained national prominence when he stood up to communist witch-hunter U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy during the senator's 1952 appearance in Las Vegas. "Hank actually stood up at this meeting and he said [to McCarthy], 'You're nothing but a bully and a bum,'" Thompson said. "Hank just didn't like bullies."

In 1961, 11 years after his gun-running escapade, Greenspun was pardoned by President John F. Kennedy. The Sun publisher was no longer a felon -- but he was still a character.

"When I was copy desk chief [in the early 1980s], Hank would call, or more often he would just wander into the newsroom just before we went to press, and he'd want to change the banner," said Tom Bruny, who today is vice president of marketing for the Fontainebleu Resort in Miami Beach, Fla.

Sometimes, a call from Greenspun would result in a Sun banner unlike that of any other newspaper in the nation. In August 1976, as Sun night editors were following on the television and on the wire developments from the Republican National Convention at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Mo., they received a telephone call from Greenspun, who was at the convention, and who wanted to dictate a headline.

"Hank said he had inside information that [California Gov. Ronald] Reagan was going to get the nomination, and the editors told him they were monitoring the wires, and no one else had that, and Hank insisted he had impeccable information, and so they bannered the street edition: 'GOP Picks Reagan,'" Bruny said.

A few hours later, after incumbent Gerald Ford narrowly defeated a strong challenge from Reagan, the presses ran again, and Sun staffers scurried out to pull papers from news racks throughout the city.

Bill Guthrie, Sun editor in the 1970s and early 1980s, believes Greenspun ran the Sun as a resource to the Las Vegas community, and wasn't afraid to tailor stories or events to cast a more favorable light on the city of Las Vegas.

"Hank jogged, and he was interested in running, so he decided to set up a marathon," Guthrie said. "The Sun invited all these world-class runners to Las Vegas, and Hank set up a press conference at the steak house of the old Hacienda hotel in order to introduce them. I was sports editor at the time, and so I was named director of the event. Well, Hank was there, and he noticed that Moe Dalitz was sitting in a booth."

The Sun publisher instructed Guthrie "to tell that gangster he's not welcome here."

Guthrie, who understandably was a little timid about ordering a reputed mobster to leave, asked Greenspun if he was sure it was Dalitz.

Hank replied: "I know him. I play gin with him every Monday night, and he's not welcome here, and I want you to tell him that."

Meet the 'new' Sun

Some things are immediately apparent about the "new" Las Vegas Sun, which now appears as an insert in the daily Review-Journal.

The "Where I Stand" column is back on the front page. There are plenty of columnists, all white and all male. The type is small and unfriendly to older readers. The soft-focus features subjects in Sunday's edition -- Roy Horn and Phyllis McGuire -- are typical Sun fodder. The classic winking sun logo has been relegated to the masthead on page 2.

The spin surrounding the transition borders on ridiculous. Saying the Sun and the R-J are two newspapers delivered in one package is like saying Cap'n Crunch Crunch Berries is like two cereals delivered in one box. The public isn't apt to buy that one when they see what appears to them to be just one paper.

But something else is apparent in the new Sun, too: The paper is a lot better than many expected. It's graphically appealing, it has a broad range of stories and eye-catching photos. There are more editorials -- in keeping with the Sun's desire to be an alternative to the more conservative R-J -- and more letters than the paper was able to publish before. The new Sun has plenty of room to explore issues, and, of course, the higher circulation that comes with being inserted into the R-J. In short, the paper has something it hasn't had since the joint-operating agreement began: Opportunity.

STEVE SEBELIUS

SSEBELIUS@LVCITYLIFE.COM

We're here today with ...

'State of Nevada' host Gwen Castaldi leaves for Utah pastures; Dave Berns takes the reins

BY EMMILY BRISTOL

It was never anyone's intention for Gwen Castaldi to be the host of KNPR's daily public affairs show "State of Nevada." Two years later, she's preparing to take her final bow as the morning news program's calm interviewer -- taking her trademark "hmmm" and "interesting" with her.

When Florence Rogers, KNPR director of programming, was gearing up to split the local classical station and NPR affiliate into two stations on Halloween 2003, she was looking for a strong, locally produced news program to anchor KNPR's morning drivetime. Castaldi, then working as a media consultant, was brought in to help write a two-year grant to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- creating a one-hour round-table discussion program in the first year and expanding to a second-hour in-depth interview this past year.

"The more we thought about what we wanted in a host, the more I realized Gwen was it," Rogers says.

However, Rogers did do a national search before choosing Castaldi. The winning candidate had to have a strong background in journalism and a formidable knowledge of Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. Oh yeah, and build up the station's news staff from one part-time reporter to a news department.

"She's given us credibility," Rogers says.

Now turning the corner on her 500th show (airing last week), Castaldi, 53, is packing her bags for retirement in Utah, with her husband.

"It's been a really wonderful experience. It was a very heartbreaking decision to make [to leave] because this has been my home," Castaldi says as she begins to cry. "I'm extremely grateful to all the people who have taken the time with me over the years."

Castaldi is leaving with more than 31 years in journalism, most of it local, in her rearview mirror. She moved to Las Vegas in 1974 after working her first gig as a reporter and photographer at a weekly newspaper in Cleveland. She then worked a brief stint at an all-news radio station after seeing an ad in the paper.

"I said, 'Look, I can talk and report. Put me on the air,'" she remembers.

In 1977 she landed in television at KLAS as an on-air news anchor where she covered organized crime. This led her to an invitation to work in Chicago, but the desert called her back.

"I had fallen in love with the desert, as it turns out," Castaldi says, explaining that she decided it was more important to be happy than climb the career ladder.

Eventually, Castaldi worked in local news at KVBC Channel 3 as a reporter and anchor, and started up an entirely new news department at KVVU Channel 5. She left local news for a a one-year stint as the Clark County communications director. After that, she did consulting work, which led her to Rogers.

So which is her favorite medium -- print, television or radio? Castaldi has a hard time deciding.

"I loved television. I had a really good career in television. ... But I was always a writer," she pauses, before adding, "I love print. I have a great love of being a writer and a reporter second."

All waffling aside, Castaldi says radio provides the most intimate journalistic setting, with both the guest and the listener.

"It's sort of a journalist's dream to have that kind of time with one person," she says.

"State of Nevada" critics say Castaldi often hesitated to ask the tough questions with her more controversial guests. But the host says she never refused to ask a question and was never pressured to play nice by Rogers or by grant-giving public broadcasting.

"I wasn't looking for a scoop. I was looking for what makes people tick. The nature of the program is to learn about who people in their community are," she says. "I'm not there to take sides or have an opinion. I'm there to facilitate discussion. Let people make their own decisions. It's not about me. It's about the issue."

And after 500 first-hour shows, Castaldi won't admit to any favorites or interviews she didn't get. New host Dave Berns will inherit Castaldi's interview list, as well as adding his own. A Friday roundtable host for some time, Berns officially took the helm on Oct. 3.

"I love public radio. I have loved public radio for 25 years. I think it's about true journalism," he says. "I'd say I'm an NPR junky."

Berns, 44, was the editor of the Business Press, a CityLife sister publication, for four months after the Stephens Media Group purchased both papers in March. He remains involved with the Business Press in a part-time capacity, which includes writing a column and maintaining his blog.

Until now Berns' 20-year journalism career has been primarily in print, including local work at the Review-Journal, with a brief one-year job in television news in Eugene, Ore. (Berns graduated from the University of Oregon, which is in Eugene.)

"Public radio is about as close to newspapers as you can get," Berns says about his new gig. "I'm really excited. This is a dream, in a lot of ways, this is a dream job."

Berns' background in print media will soon influence "State of Nevada" as he plans to have a more magazine approach to the show, breaking up the first-hour into smaller 15-minute segments with varying topics.

"What I want to do, what any good newspaper reporter does, is kind of shine a light on the valley," he says.

And with Berns moving out of the Friday spot, R-J political reporter Erin Neff will be taking over. Her first two-hour program is scheduled for Oct. 7. Like Berns, Neff is a hard-core NPR fan. She grew up listening to the first installments of "Fresh Air" out of her native Philadelphia. And her degree is in broadcast journalism.

Neff says her Friday show will rely heavily on politics but she plans to incorporate some of her other loves as well, such as interviews with athletes and entertainers. Neff covered boxing early in her career and is still a fan.

As for Castaldi, she has several taped interviews scheduled to air during the coming weeks. And she plans to continue to observe Las Vegas politics, even from afar.

"I'll be reading everything. I'll be keeping my eye on things," she says.

Emmily Bristol is a CityLife staff writer. She can be reached at 871-6780 ext. 344 or ebristol@lvpress.com.