Outsiders don’t see the cruise ship. Sometimes we don’t even see it: The resorts, the attractions, the stadiums—they all add up to one big hospitality vessel docked in the middle of the Valley, a love boat pumped up with anabolic steroids and legal hallucinogens. And for the most part, we only work there; we are not citizens of the Fontainebleau or the Cosmopolitan. We do our bit and we go ashore. And an astonishing number of outsiders, particularly the journalists now writing about our wonky economy, have never been disabused of that misconception. When they write about Vegas, they can only speak of what they’ve seen on the boat.

The term for this is “parachute journalism”—literal drop-in assessments. Vegas is a frequent target of parachute journalists, and has been since long before Hunter S. Thompson knitted two separate press events into one very fictionalized psychotic episode. They come in, with the confidence only comped hotel rooms can provide, and declare that the city is failing (or has failed). It’s like being blindfolded, dropped into Times Square for 20 minutes, blindfolded again and spirited home, where you confidently wrote that New York City is all Bubba Gump franchises, jukebox musicals and costumed Pokémon.

And we let them get to us, time and again. Several times a year, my social feeds go nuts as locals dissect a piece of national writing that’s misunderstood this city. These stories get facts wrong; they omit important context; they make outdated and cringeworthy Elvis and 99-cent shrimp cocktail references. And then they confidently tell us why our economy is doomed, and why we’re fools to live here. There are a lot of these

stories circulating right now, and we’re still letting them make us crazy even though we know better. We’ve got to tune them out. Those stories are not actually about us, but the imaginary cruise ship.

“People popping in to report on us can feel like cultural appropriation—it sometimes comes off as superficial, inaccurate and stereotypical coverage,” says Melinda Sheckells, Las Vegas-based correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter. “On the other side of the coin, people who’ve been to Vegas once or twice, or have watched Casino a dozen times, think they really get it, because Vegas is one of the biggest main character cities and has this enrapturing way of convincing everyone they’re an expert.”

“We like to think that this is a cosmopolitan town, but it’s a small town at heart,” says Scott Dickensheets, a longtime local journalist and former editor of the Weekly. “There’s a basic provincialism here, and a sense that you must be here a while to get this town. … On our part, I think it’s a failure to understand that what readers outside this city want to know about Vegas. … The things we care about are not the things that people reading the New York Times care about.”

Stories about Vegas’ imminent death are now proliferating in our news feeds. Death by resort fees; death by Gen Z’s changing tastes; death by the spread of sports betting; death by water shortage and/or heat bubble (could happen); death by parking fees. (“We have generational parking trauma!” Sheckells says, and she ain’t wrong.)

Try not to let them get to you. Measure them all by what you’ve experienced on the ground … and try to give them credit for what they get right.

“I think this is one of the few towns where an outsider’s view can be just as relevant as an insider’s view,” Dickensheets says. “I read plenty of parachute journalism. Some of it is as good as stuff that’s being done here, even if it doesn’t get all the references exactly right. But I think some of their gist is more correct for the distance that they have.”

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