As you can see by the view-obscuring flap on the cover, the future has caught up with the Weekly. We’ve got a new website. Don’t quibble over my use of the word “new,” either. As you’ll see if you ever tried to use our previous website—apparently a relic left over by the Anasazi, with less functionality than my new fridge—lasvegasweekly.com hasn’t merely been redesigned or revamped. It’s been re-everythinged. I mean, it used to be we couldn’t use italics—italics! Now we have italics and video of a pretty girl asking people offbeat questions (Girl on the Street). Italics and a full cattle-drive of bloggers (Las Vegas Voices). Italics and an online community (My Weekly Peeps). Plus much more. It’s the future we’ve all imagined.
I’m writing this in Denver, in a hotel room 10 stories above the conference facility where the journalism conference I’m attending just hosted a session called “Integrating Print and Internet Culture.” If that sounds like a doozy of a topic, well, yeah. Large swaths of print culture are suspicious of the web, its flash and superficiality, its fearsome reductive powers (I’ve sat through endless seminars in recent years in which I’ve been told that web users don’t want to, you know, read—that you have to strip everything down to its basic components in order to grab eyeballs).
On the other hand, web folk (I think of them as wee sprites from a magical land, with large foreheads and curl-toed felt shoes) tend to get so evangelical about converting us Anasazi to the Internet (“reporters have to start thinking of themselves as ‘content-providers’”) that they have a tin ear for the way phrases such as “content-providers” imply blandness, generic typing.
When it came time to do something about our site, the Greenspun Media Group hired an Internet vice-president, Laurel Nelson-Rowe, and a web content editor, an affable Aussie named Adrian Zupp, and pointed them toward the Weekly burrow. We brainstormed—what would the ideal website contain? Video? Blogs? Porn! Print and Internet cultures began to integrate, at least a little. (I’ve stopped wearing crosses when I enter Laurel’s office.) Many ideas were written on Post-It notes and collated on whiteboards, a sure sign of progress. If not all of our brilliant ideas made it to the new site (sorry kids, no porn), there’s still enough fresh stuff to keep you busy for a while. The web folk, their huge foreheads athrob, their curly slippers unwashed because they haven’t been home, have worked untold elfin hours to roll this baby out, and even a Luddite like me can appreciate the difference.
You’ll see some familiar faces in new roles, as bloggers. Staff writer Julie Seabaugh will track the comedy scene in her blog; staff writer Damon Hodge will extend his concerns about politics, crime and social issues onto the web; even executive editor Stacy J. Willis and I will give it a try with a back-and-forth blog-thingie, which we first tried to title Scott and Stacy Natter on About Things Only Five of You Care About, and when that didn’t fly, we tried Blog Is Dead (assuming that if it wasn’t really dead, we’d quickly finish it off) before finally settling on Now What?
So stop by, vote for your Beautiful Person of the week, answer the daily poll and generally hang around long enough to impress our advertisers. Then tell us what you think.
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At this same conference—the City and Regional Magazine Association’s annual bash, which I attended on behalf of our sister publication, Las Vegas Life—they handed out a few awards. (Yes, okay, Life won one, a gold award for reader service, but that’s not what I want to boast about.)
The gold for general criticism went to Los Angeles magazine for book reviews by a writer named Tom Carson. Readers with short memories might recall that name from last week’s Weekly, in which Carson wrote a grabby and insightful meditation on the song “Gimme Shelter.”
A few weeks earlier, at the National Magazine Awards in New York City (the Oscars of magazine writing, as they’re invariably billed), GQ writer Andrew Corsello took home a statue for ... well, who cares? It was a great story, whatever it was. Point is, he also wrote for Las Vegas Weekly back in August—4,000 amazing words about Andre Agassi. (Equally amazing: We were able to get italics for the web version of that story.) I urge you to fire up our new site and search it out. It’s proof that, online and in print, we’re always trying to show you something new, something surprising, something really good.