I don’t have a Green Felt Journal in this week’s Vegas Seven, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t contribute. This time out, I focused my gimlet eye on the fact that, several times over the past year, “local bloggers” beat the mainstream media to the punch:
Looking back at the past year, several important casino stories weren’t broken by the dailies, or even the weeklies; they were first reported on VegasTripping.com, a website that is increasingly first with news from the Las Vegas casino industry. In July, news about Aria’s Legionella outbreak first surfaced on the site after a hotel guest shared the e-mail that the hotel had sent him. It wasn’t until the next day that anyone else picked the story up.
I thought that there was enough of a critical mass of cases where VegasTripping had been first and been right to start a conversation about it. I think that the nature of news–particularly in specialist areas like Vegas hotels–is changing, and that we’ll see more news broken by outlets like VT in the future.