A fourth-generation Nevadan, John L. Smith (b. 1960) wrote a column for the Las Vegas Review-Journal for nearly three decades, worked earlier at the Las Vegas Sun, and now contributes a Sunday column to The Nevada Independent. His byline has appeared in Time, Rolling Stone, Reader’s Digest, Reuters, and The Daily Beast. The Nevada Press Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2016, the same year he received the James Foley/Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism, the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Award, and the Ancil Payne Award from the University of Oregon. In 2025 the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno named him its Laxalt Distinguished Writer. He is married to the writer Sally Denton, is the father of an adult daughter, Amelia, and divides his home between Nevada and New Mexico.
Smith built his reputation on a method that runs against the literary tradition of writing about Las Vegas. Where Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) rendered the city as hallucination and Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) treated it as a theater of American excess, Smith treats it as a workplace. He grounds his reporting in courthouses, city halls, casino back offices, sheriff’s substations, and neighborhood bars. He asks who holds power, how the man acquired it, and what follows from his choices. That orientation pushed him toward biography, and across more than a dozen books he has assembled a social history of the state told through the lives of the men and women who built it, governed it, gamed it, and survived it.
His first major book remains his most contested. Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn appeared in 1995 and traced the rise of Steve Wynn (b. 1942) from Golden Nugget operator to the developer behind the Mirage, Treasure Island, and the Bellagio. Smith examined the convergence of finance, real-estate speculation, regulatory politics, and old organized-crime allegations that reshaped the Strip. He also reported on a confidential Scotland Yard assessment that complicated Wynn’s effort to open a casino in London. Wynn sued the original publisher and forced it into bankruptcy, an early sign of the legal pressure that would later define Smith’s career. The book reappeared in paperback and established him as a chronicler of Nevada’s power structure.
The Animal in Hollywood: Anthony Fiato’s Life in the Mafia extends Smith’s interest in hidden networks past the Nevada line. The book recounts the career of mob enforcer Anthony Fiato across both coasts and into the entertainment industry. Smith presents organized crime not as folklore but as a working system of intimidation, loyalty, violence, and business arrangement. The book sits beside his casino and political work because it studies the informal arrangements that operate beneath official institutions.
In 1998 Smith collected his newspaper writing in On the Boulevard: The Best of John L. Smith. The volume gathers the columns that made him the city’s most-read newspaperman and ranges across mayors, slot cheats, junket operators, and forgotten fighters. Critics praised the collection as portraiture of an entire populace rather than reportage about a gambling town. The book shows the columnist as miniaturist, a writer who could fix a life in a few hundred words.
Quicksilver: The Ted Binion Murder Case, produced with Review-Journal photographer Jeff Scheid, documents the trial that gripped Las Vegas after the death of casino heir Lonnie “Ted” Binion in 1998. Some called it overdose, some suicide, and investigators called it murder. Binion’s girlfriend Sandy Murphy and her associate Rick Tabish faced charges, and the courtroom drama that followed became a local crime of the century. Smith narrates the case while Scheid’s photographs carry much of the account, a hybrid of true-crime reporting and pictorial record.
Smith’s most ambitious biography is Of Rats and Men: Oscar Goodman’s Life from Mob Mouthpiece to Mayor of Las Vegas, published in 2003. The book follows Oscar Goodman (b. 1939), who spent more than three decades as the country’s foremost criminal-defense attorney for reputed organized-crime figures, his client list running from Meyer Lansky to Anthony Spilotro and Frank Rosenthal. Goodman then won election as mayor of Las Vegas. Through one man Smith maps the city’s passage from mob influence to corporate governance, and he weighs the question Goodman’s career always raised: how a lawyer mingles with the underworld for decades without joining it.
Sharks in the Desert: The Fine Art of Liquidating Your Competition, from 2005, traces the gaming racket’s evolution from mob-run vice to corporate enterprise through the biographies of the men who drove the change. A short passage on casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson (1933-2021) triggered a long libel suit. The disputed material covered a small part of the book, yet the litigation imposed heavy costs and contributed to Smith’s decision to seek bankruptcy protection. Press-freedom advocates cited his case in their push to strengthen Nevada’s anti-SLAPP statute, and the episode turned a local columnist into a national example of how concentrated wealth can use legal expense against a reporter.
In Bluegrass Days, Neon Nights: High Rolling With Happy Chandler’s Wayward Son, Dan Chandler, published in 2010, Smith narrates the life of Las Vegas casino host Dan Chandler, son of former Kentucky governor and baseball commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler (1898-1991). Dan grew up in the Governor’s Mansion, arrived in Las Vegas as the mob era faded, and made his name at Caesars Palace among high rollers and entertainers from Frank Sinatra to Willie Nelson. The book reads as the memoir of a vanishing Vegas character, told in his own cadence.
No Limit: The Rise and Fall of Bob Stupak and Las Vegas’ Stratosphere Tower studies Bob Stupak (1942-2009), the self-styled “Polish Maverick” who turned a small slot joint into the high-volume Vegas World through outrageous promotion and media manipulation. His VIP Vacation campaign drew tourists and regulatory sanction alike, and the seed money funded early construction of the Stratosphere Tower. The tower rose on heavy debt and steep interest, and the no-lose proposition became a high-profile failure. Stupak stands as a transitional figure, an entrepreneur between the mob-connected city and the corporate metropolis.
Smith also writes fiction and verse. Even a Street Dog: Las Vegas Stories, from 2014, presents short fiction narrated by Jasper Lamar Crabbe, a cagey survivor who guides the reader through a harder, older Las Vegas beneath the one the Travel Channel sells. The stories work at street level, the product of a writer who left real shoe leather on those sidewalks. Card Trick: Poems, published in 2018, collects seventeen love poems set in Tonopah, on Mount Charleston, and along the desert roads familiar to his column readers, a turn toward the lyric that widened his range.
His most personal book is Amelia’s Long Journey: Stories about a brave girl and her fight against cancer, also from 2018. Smith and his late wife Tricia gained custody of their adopted daughter, and the columns gathered here record Amelia’s early years, her chronic illness, the diagnosis of a brain tumor, and the long course of surgery, treatment, relapse, and recovery. Many readers who first knew Smith through scandal or casino investigation came to regard this writing as his finest. The hard-edged investigator becomes a chronicler of caregiving and grief.
The Westside Slugger: Joe Neal’s Lifelong Fight for Social Justice, published in 2019 in the Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in Nevada History, tells the story of Joe Neal (1935-2020), the first African American to serve in the Nevada State Senate. Neal rose from Mound, Louisiana, during the Depression, joined the Air Force, helped register the first Black voters in Madison Parish, and moved to southern Nevada in 1963. For more than thirty years he spoke for the powerless against sheriffs, governors, and casino titans, and he pushed reforms in hotel fire safety, public education, and the protection of Lake Tahoe. The book doubles as a civil-rights history of Las Vegas.
Saints, Sinners, and Sovereign Citizens: The Endless War over the West’s Public Lands, from 2021, places the 2014 armed standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and federal agents within the longer Sagebrush Rebellion and the century-old struggle over federal land. Smith reports true believers on both sides and traces the political and financial interests that shape the fight. He follows the violence that trailed the standoff, the murder of two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian, and the later occupation of the Malheur refuge in Oregon. The book argues that the latest range war carries national stakes for the future of public land.
Smith’s recent collaboration, My Life in Nevada Politics: The Memoirs of Richard H. Bryan, appeared in 2024 from the University of Nevada Press. Written with Richard H. Bryan (b. 1937), the book follows Bryan from a Las Vegas boyhood to county public defender, state legislator, attorney general, governor, and United States senator. Bryan led the early fight against the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository and authored the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act. The memoir offers a practitioner’s account of state politics across decades of change.
Two further works round out his Las Vegas shelf. Vegas Voices: Conversations with Great Las Vegas Characters gives the city’s figures their own words, among them “Cowboy Sheriff” Ralph Lamb (1927-2015), trumpet master Tommy Porrello, and singer Ruth Gillis, an oral history that preserves voices the record might otherwise lose. Destination Las Vegas: The Story Behind the Scenery is a short, illustrated guide to the city’s landmarks, both the mainstream stops and the lesser-known ones such as the National Finals Rodeo.
Late in his career Smith turned to younger readers with the Fields of Silver and Gold series, biographies that recover the West through individual lives. Sarah Winnemucca: A Princess for the People, from 2020, profiles the Northern Paiute advocate, writer, and interpreter Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891), honored today by a statue in the United States Capitol. Snowshoe Thompson: Sierra Mailman, also 2020, follows the Norwegian-born carrier Snowshoe Thompson (1827-1876) who crossed the Sierra on skis of his own design to deliver mail and who helped found California skiing. Anne Martin: The March for Suffrage, published in 2021, recovers the suffragist and scholar Anne Martin (1875-1951), the first woman to run for the United States Senate. Ben Palmer: Black Pioneers on the Frontier, from the same year, tells of the formerly enslaved rancher who became a respected Nevada statesman, the first Black man to sit on a United States District Court jury in the state. The Pony Express: True Tales and Frontier Legends and Pioneering Medicine: From Sage to Surgery, both from 2022, treat the short-lived mail relay and the early healers of the West, from trained physicians such as Eliza Cook to shamans, midwives, and traditional practitioners.
Smith belongs to the last generation of metropolitan columnists who joined investigative reporting, local historical memory, and daily civic commentary in a single public role. As newspaper ownership concentrated and local journalism fractured, his career came to stand for a model of public life now in retreat. The defining institutional fight of that career came in 2015 and 2016, when interests tied to Sheldon Adelson secretly bought the Review-Journal. Smith and several colleagues helped uncover the new ownership. When management barred him from writing about Adelson and Wynn, the two men he had reported on for decades, he resigned, and the resignation drew national attention as a case study in the economics of modern journalism.
Taken together, his books form a biography of Nevada told through its people. Steve Wynn carries corporate power, Bob Stupak entrepreneurial nerve, Oscar Goodman the city’s relation to the mob, Ralph Lamb its law enforcement, Anthony Fiato the underworld beneath official institutions, Joe Neal its civil-rights struggle, and Richard Bryan its electoral mainstream. The frontier figures of the Fields of Silver and Gold series reach back to the inheritance that made the rest possible. Few journalists have documented a single state’s political, criminal, economic, and cultural history with comparable breadth. Smith’s achievement rests less in any one column than in the cumulative portrait of a place where money, ambition, crime, and reinvention met at unusual speed, and in the record he leaves of the people who lived there.
The Sediment of One Man: John L. Smith and the Tacit
Most writers who reach for tacit knowledge reach for Polanyi and stop at the slogan: we know more than we can tell. Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) starts from suspicion. In The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions he goes after the assumption that tacit knowledge is a shared thing, a common deposit held by a group and handed from one member to the next. He denies that practices are collective objects with contents we all download. When two people act alike, Turner says, they got there by separate roads. Each built his habits through his own history of exposure, trial, and correction. The sameness is achieved through feedback, not inheritance. Tacit knowledge, on this account, is individual. It is the residue of a particular life.
John L. Smith is a case the frame fits, and fits with an edge most readers miss. His authority over Las Vegas rests on knowledge no manual holds. He knows the courthouse clerks, the casino hosts, the substation gossip, the families that connect across forty years of the city’s history. The easy reading calls this the city’s tacit knowledge, lodged in a native son who carries it for the rest of us. Turner blocks that reading. What Smith holds is not the city’s deposit. It is Smith’s own habituation, the sediment of one man’s decades of contact and correction. Fourth-generation memory and thirty years on the beat did not load a shared file into him. They tuned him. No one else carries the same tuning because no one else walked the same road.
That is why the knowledge resists codification. Turner’s claim, sharpened in Understanding the Tacit, grounds the tacit in individual habituation and the slow neural tuning that experience lays down. The knowing has no portable form. You cannot write it out and hand it to a successor. Ask Smith how he knows a source is lying, or which official to call when a story breaks, and the explanation thins to nothing useful. He knows more than he can tell, and what he cannot tell did not come from a guild he might re-enroll a new man into. It came from his own causal history, and it stays there.
Now the institutional story falls into place. When interests tied to Sheldon Adelson (1933-2021) bought the Review-Journal and barred Smith from writing about Adelson and Steve Wynn (b. 1942), they treated the column as a slot. A slot takes any competent writer. On Turner’s reading the error sits in the premise. Owners look for a shared body of skill they can transfer or replace, and the tacit is not that body. They could hire a man with the title. They could not hire the habituation. The corporate newsroom cannot see the asset because the asset keeps no form on a balance sheet and has no life apart from the person. To the new owner Smith’s judgment looked like opinion, or local color, or attitude. It never looked like knowledge, because the outsider lacks the tuning that lets him recognize the knowledge as knowledge. He priced it at zero. The libel exposure from Sharks in the Desert and the long Adelson suit only deepened the blindness. The institution saw legal cost. It did not see the knowing that drew the cost.
So the death of the metropolitan columnist reads as the liquidation of an expertise the newsroom cannot reproduce, and Turner explains why nothing remains to inherit. If tacit knowledge were a shared deposit, an institution might bank it, train it, pass it down through apprenticeship. It is not a deposit. It dies with the role and with the man. Each columnist of Smith’s kind was a singular accretion built over decades of walking the same streets. End the role, and the accretion ends with him. There is no estate to settle, no library to transfer, only the bare title for the next hire to fill with a tuning he does not have and cannot acquire on the schedule a quarterly budget allows.
Smith does codify. He writes books, and the books are explicit. Running Scared and Of Rats and Men put facts about Wynn and Oscar Goodman (b. 1939) on the page where anyone can read them. Does the writing not transmit the tacit after all? Turner’s answer holds the line. The books are products of the tuning, not the tuning. Running Scared exists because Smith knew where to look, knew whom to press, knew which silence carried weight. The book does not pass along the knowing-where-to-look. A reader closes Of Rats and Men with an account of Oscar Goodman, not with Smith’s nose for the next story. The output travels. The capacity stays put. That gap is the argument in one line.
What the lens yields, then, is a single premise that carries the whole case. The tacit is individual, the sediment of one history, and it cannot be banked. From that one claim follow the non-transferability of Smith’s craft, the owner’s blindness to its value, and the finality of its loss when the role ends. Smith was the asset and the archive at once. When the paper stopped paying him to walk the desert, the asset stopped accruing. The books remain on the shelf. The man who might have written the next ones does not come back to the desk, and the knowledge that would have filled them goes with him.
Allies and Rivals in the Desert: John L. Smith Through Alliance Theory
David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie Haselton argue in their paper that political belief systems come not from abstract values but from alliance structures. People pick allies by similarity, transitivity, and interdependence, and then defend those allies with a set of propagandistic biases: perpetrator biases that rationalize an ally’s wrongdoing, victim biases that embellish an ally’s grievance, attributional biases that credit an ally’s success to character and blame his failure on circumstance. Moral language, on this account, masks loyalty. The strange bedfellows of the title are the incompatible principles a coalition ends up holding once it gathers enough allies. Turn this lens on John L. Smith (b. 1960) and his subjects, and the city he covered for forty years stops looking like a place of values and starts looking like an alliance structure laid bare. Smith already worked this way. He set stated principle aside and mapped who stood with whom.
His columns and books are alliance maps. He asks who holds power and whom that power depends on. The Las Vegas he documents is a network of casino owners, sheriffs, politicians, defense lawyers, and union men bound less by shared ideals than by interdependence, the cue Pinsof and his coauthors place at the center of alliance formation. Each party reliably supplies the others. The casino needs the license, the sheriff needs the campaign money, the politician needs the donor, the lawyer needs the client. Of Rats and Men: Oscar Goodman’s Life from Mob Mouthpiece to Mayor of Las Vegas traces this interdependence through one man. Oscar Goodman (b. 1939)‘s bond with his clients was not a meeting of values. It was a supply of benefits in both directions, and it held for decades.
The three kinds of alliance the paper borrows from primatology fit Smith’s cast. Conservative alliances form among high-status players to hold rank, and Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn sit there, the corporate gaming establishment guarding its position. Revolutionary alliances form among lower-status players to climb, and Bob Stupak, the outsider promoter who willed the Stratosphere into the skyline, belongs to that group, as does Joe Neal, who built a Black political coalition against the white Nevada power structure in The Westside Slugger. Bridging alliances join high and low, and Goodman is the purest example Smith ever found, the lawyer who linked the underworld to city hall and then governed from the second while drawing his history from the first. The bridging figure recurs across the whole body of work.
What holds these alliances together is interdependence, not creed, and the mob-to-corporate passage Smith chronicles reads as a realignment of the structure rather than a change of heart. Sharks in the Desert follows the gaming racket from mob vice to corporate enterprise. The industry rebranded gambling as gaming and told a story of cleaned-up legitimacy. That story is perpetrator-bias propaganda in the paper’s exact sense: downplay the origins, embellish the good intentions, minimize the harm. The libel suits sharpen the point. Wynn sued the original publisher of Running Scared and forced it into bankruptcy. Adelson sued over a passage in Sharks in the Desert. A perpetrator defending his reputation against an unflattering account behaves the way the theory predicts, and the propaganda travels by lawsuit when it cannot travel by press release.
The Bundy material gives the cleanest case in Smith’s corpus. Saints, Sinners, and Sovereign Citizens sets the 2014 standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy (b. 1946) and federal agents inside the longer Sagebrush Rebellion. The coalition that gathered around Bundy is a strange-bedfellows assembly: ranchers, sovereign citizens, militia, anti-government activists, far-right county officials. No coherent philosophy unites them. A shared rival unites them, the federal government, joined to a historical accident, the long fight over western land. The coalition runs on transitivity, the enemy of my enemy. It holds incompatible principles at once, which the paper treats as the signature of any alliance broad enough to matter. The grievance narrative does the rest. The rancher appears as victim of Washington overreach, and the harm gets embellished to draw third parties in, a textbook victim bias. The attribution follows the pattern Pinsof and his coauthors find among the losers of globalization, who trace their decline to outside forces rather than to themselves. Smith reports the other side running its own victim story about despoiled public land, and the result is the competitive victimhood the paper describes, each side claiming the larger wound.
The Review-Journal episode reads as an alliance move from start to finish. Interests tied to Adelson bought the paper in secret and barred Smith from writing about Adelson and Wynn. The owner shielded an ally and shielded himself, and he silenced a rival. Smith had become a rival to the ownership coalition because he would not run its perpetrator-bias propaganda. Then transitivity did its work in his favor. The press-freedom community and the anti-SLAPP reformers rallied to him, since the rival of Adelson was their friend, and Smith’s resignation hardened into a cause that mobilized support far past Nevada. Honesty about the frame requires one more step. Alliance Theory would read Smith’s own press-freedom framing as propaganda too, a victim bias that recruits allies to a cause. That is the provocation built into the theory, and it applies to the sympathetic figure as readily as to the powerful one. The lens does not grant Smith an exemption.
Smith’s city also displays the split between politics and morality that the paper draws at the end. Goodman defended his clients on the principle that they held constitutional rights like anyone else, a moral claim, yet the function of the bond was loyalty and mutual benefit. Smith saw through the moral language to the loyalty beneath it, again and again, across mayors and sheriffs and casino men. That is the central move of Alliance Theory, and Smith made it for thirty years without the vocabulary.
His Nevada has no deep pattern, which suits the theory’s account of stochastic, self-reinforcing alliances. Mob money built the city. Corporate money displaced the mob. Political money reshaped the press. Each shift grew from small advantages that fed on themselves and snowballed, not from any logic of values working itself out. The passage from mob to corporate gaming parallels the partisan realignments the paper lays out, contingent rather than inevitable, an accident that hardened into structure and then looked permanent to those living inside it.
The frame strains in places, and the strain is worth marking. Alliance Theory was built for mass partisan belief systems, and its evidence is survey data about liberals and conservatives. Smith’s material is elite power networks and named individuals, so the transfer runs by analogy rather than by direct fit. The paper explains the contents of belief, while much of Smith’s subject is action and money. The enforcement career in The Animal in Hollywood: Anthony Fiato’s Life in the Mafia turns on force, not propaganda, and there the word alliance still applies but belief system falls away. The theory’s claim that both partisan sides carry symmetrical biases has no clean analogue in a story about particular men chasing particular fortunes. The lens lights up the Bundy coalition and the gaming-legitimacy narrative best, because those are belief systems doing strategic work. It lights up the back-room enforcement least, because that is leverage, not rhetoric.
Read through Alliance Theory, then, Smith’s forty years gather into a single argument the paper would endorse. The city runs on loyalty and interdependence. The moral language is cover. The coalitions are accidents that set into structure. Smith never reached for the term. He walked the streets, asked who stood with whom, and wrote down the answer.
Value to a Community: John L. Smith Through Larry McEnerney
Larry McEnerney, in his talk “The Craft of Writing Effectively,” separates two things most writers run together. One is writing that shows you understand a subject, the kind school rewards and teachers are paid to read. The other is writing valuable to a community of readers, the kind the world rewards and no one is paid to read. Value is the only test that survives outside the classroom. A text earns its keep when it changes what its readers think, when it hands a particular community something the community needs and cannot get elsewhere. The reader decides, reading fast and reading skeptical, and drops anything that fails to pay him back for the time. Effort counts for nothing. Knowledge counts for nothing on its own. Elegance counts for nothing. Run this account on John L. Smith (b. 1960) and his career explains itself. He told Las Vegas things about its own power structure that changed how the city understood itself.
The community he wrote for was never a national literary audience. It was the people who lived inside the structure he described and the people who watched it work: gamblers, hosts, sheriffs, lawyers, developers, and ordinary residents who wanted to know who ran their town. They carried a shared model of the place. Smith’s worth lay in moving that model, in adjusting what his readers took to be true about the city they lived in.
He named who held power and how the power operated. He showed how Steve Wynn (b. 1942) built and wielded his empire, who Oscar Goodman (b. 1939) had been before he reached city hall, where the gaming industry came from before it called itself an industry. Running Scared, Of Rats and Men, and Sharks in the Desert each shifted the community’s picture of its own leadership. A reader closed one of them holding a different account of the city than he held before. That change is value in McEnerney’s sense, and it is the whole of it.
McEnerney teaches that valuable writing finds an instability in what a community takes as settled and goes to work on it. The words that signal value to expert readers are the words that mark tension: however, but, although, anomaly. Smith’s investigative posture lives in that gap, the space between the city’s official picture of itself and its actual arrangements. Every exposé is a “but the truth runs otherwise” set against the settled image. The reader who already suspected a gap came to Smith to have it named and filled.
He earned the skeptical reader’s attention by delivering, column after column, for decades. More than two thousand of them ran in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Readers came to the byline because the byline paid them back. They trusted the column to tell them something about their world they could not learn from the press releases, the casino marketing, or the official record. That trust is the reputation a writer builds when his readers keep finding value and stop checking whether the next piece will hold it.
Every community has a code, McEnerney says, a set of words and references that mark a text as valuable to that community and invisible or worthless to outsiders. Smith mastered the local code. He knew the names, the rooms, the courthouse procedure, the floor vocabulary of the casinos. That fluency marked his writing as valuable to the people who lived in the structure rather than to a literary readership somewhere else. Set him beside Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and the contrast turns on community, not talent. Thompson and Wolfe wrote for a national readership that prized voice and spectacle. Smith wrote for the readership that lived inside the machine and prized accurate information about itself. Different communities reward different things, and a text valuable to one can be worthless to the other.
This is why the prose was never the point. McEnerney holds value and craft apart, and Smith’s plain style fits the separation. The worth rode on the information, on the changed model, on the gap closed. A more decorated stylist might have produced a more admired column and a less valuable one for that readership. The value was the information, delivered to readers who could not get it elsewhere and whose understanding of the town moved because of it.
The collapse follows from the same logic. When interests tied to Sheldon Adelson bought the paper and barred Smith from writing about Adelson and Wynn, they cut his access to the instabilities the community most needed resolved, the men at the dead center of the structure. McEnerney’s frame predicts what came next. A text can keep all its craft and turn worthless, because value sits in the reader’s need and the problem addressed, never in the writer’s skill. Severed from the valuable subjects, Smith’s column kept its competence and lost its function. So he left. Without the subjects that carried the value, the writing had nothing left to do.
The wider decline reads the same way. Value in this frame depends on a community that shares a model the writing can change. As the local readership fragmented and the paper passed into new hands, the single readership whose picture Smith could move began to dissolve. No shared model, nothing to add to it. The end of the metropolitan columnist appears here as the loss of the community that made the writing valuable, not as the loss of a craft. The craft was never the asset.
The frame has a limit. McEnerney built it for academic and professional writing aimed at communities that solve recognized problems, and Smith’s readership was a civic public, not a guild. Not all of that public read for value in the strict sense. The columns on his daughter Amelia in Amelia’s Long Journey, and the obituaries that let readers smell the old arenas, created a worth closer to communion than to problem-solving, and the value-to-a-community model captures that poorly. The lens lights up the power-structure work and dims on the elegiac work. McEnerney also writes to instruct living writers, so applied to Smith after the fact it describes more than it prescribes. That fits, and it should be named.
Smith’s worth was never his prose and never his labor. It was the value he carried to a community that could not get it anywhere else, the corrected model of a city’s power. When ownership cut him from the subjects that held the value, the worth left with them, however well he still wrote.
John’s Set
John L. Smith (b. 1960) belongs to a small guild, the independent press corps of Nevada and the writers who chronicle the state’s power. The guild has a current address. Smith writes now for The Nevada Independent, the nonprofit site Jon Ralston founded in 2017, and he sits there beside Howard Stutz, the longtime casino reporter who once helped expose the secret that broke Smith’s old paper. His closest peer lives in his own home. His wife, Sally Denton, is an investigative author whose books on Nevada money and power, among them The Money and the Power with Roger Morris, run in the same vein as his own. The marriage is also a working alliance of the trade.
The cohort that fixed Smith’s standing formed in the winter of 2015, inside the Las Vegas Review-Journal newsroom, when the staff turned its reporting on its own buyer. The paper had sold for $140 million in cash to a concealed owner. The reporters traced the trail through a Connecticut publisher, Michael Schroeder, and a strange out-of-state attack on a Las Vegas judge, Elizabeth Gonzalez, and they named Sheldon Adelson (1933-2021) as the man behind the shell. Editor Michael Hengel left within weeks. Deputy editor Jim Wright left months later and kept criticizing the paper from outside. The three reporters credited with the unmasking, Howard Stutz, James DeHaven, and Jennifer Robison, all departed. The judges of the James Foley Medill Medal honored the seven who did the work. That episode is the guild’s founding story in miniature, and Smith’s resignation from the same paper, when management barred him from writing about Adelson and Steve Wynn, sealed his place in it.
Behind the living members stand the elders and the forebears. Hank Greenspun (1909-1989) built the Las Vegas Sun into a paper that fought the powerful, and his name still marks the rival lineage to the Review-Journal. The mob-chronicler line runs through Nicholas Pileggi (b. 1933), whose Casino did for the national audience what Smith did for the local one. The literary interpreters of the city, Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) and Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), are the figures Smith measured himself against and rejected, since he wanted the workplace and not the spectacle. The keepers of the state’s memory belong here too: Geoff Schumacher at the Mob Museum, the historian Michael Green at UNLV, the late reporter and anthologist A.D. Hopkins. The institutions that bless the guild complete the roster, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame, the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the press-freedom advocates who used Smith’s libel ordeal to push Nevada’s anti-SLAPP law.
What this set values is information that the powerful want hidden, and the courage to print it. They prize the scoop that cannot be killed, the source no one else has, the document that closes a case. They prize independence above income, and they say so often. They treat the reporter who walks away from a paycheck on principle as having done the highest thing the trade allows. They value the book over the column, since a book outlasts the day and proves a man could sustain an argument across three hundred pages. They value the native’s knowledge of the ground, the sense of a place earned by living in it. And they value transparency as a near-sacred good, which is why the concealed sale of a newspaper struck them as a desecration and not a mere business deal.
Their hero is the incorruptible newspaperman who afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. The phrase comes down from Finley Peter Dunne‘s saloon philosopher, and the guild has carried it for a century as a creed. The hero stands between the citizen and the men who run things. He cannot be bought, cannot be flattered, cannot be scared off. He takes the side of what Smith called the little people against the blowhard billionaires. Smith’s resignation letter put the code in his own words when he wrote about not punching down in weight class, meaning a man with a column aims his blows upward, at the strong, never at the weak. The hero suffers for the work. Bankruptcy under the weight of Adelson’s libel suit became, in the guild’s telling, a wound earned in the line of duty, and the suffering raised Smith’s standing rather than lowered it.
Status among them runs on a few currencies. The first is the scoop and the byline, the proof that you got there first and got it right. The second is the award and the title: the Foley medal, the Hall of Fame, the informal rank of dean that Ralston now holds after more than thirty years on the beat. The third, and the one the guild guards most jealously, is the record of what you refused. Standing comes from the bribe you turned down, the threat you ignored, the job you quit. A man gains rank by losing something for the cause. The resignation is the purest status move in the repertoire, since it converts a career setback into moral capital. The fourth currency is the book, which lifts the columnist above the daily grinder and marks him as a writer with a body of work. Smith’s shelf of biographies, and Denton’s, place them near the top of the local order on this count.
The set also makes claims about what ought to be, and these run deep. The public has a right to know who owns its newspaper, and concealment of that ownership is a wrong in itself. A reporter ought to disclose his conflicts and refuse the ones he cannot disclose. An owner ought to keep his hands off the newsroom. A journalist ought to take the side of the governed against the governing. These oughts are held with the firmness of articles of faith, and the guild treats a breach of them, as in the Adelson purchase, not as a difference of opinion but as a sin against the trade.
Underneath the oughts lie claims about essence, about what a person is rather than what he does. The guild speaks of the newspaperman as a calling and a kind of man, not a job description. It speaks of having the city in your blood, of being a fourth-generation Nevadan who carries the place inside him, as Smith does. It treats courage as a trait of character, something a man has or lacks, rather than a skill he learns. It treats the truth-teller as a type born to the work and the corrupt billionaire as essentially corrupt, rotten through, beyond reform. This romance of the born reporter and the born scoundrel gives the guild its color and also its blind spot, since it lets the set cast every fight as character against character and skip the duller question of incentives.
Their moral grammar is built from a few opposed pairs. Sunlight against secrecy. The little guy against the powerful. The incorruptible against the bought. Courage against cowardice. Independence against the leash. Inside this grammar, transparency is the supreme virtue and concealment the cardinal vice, which is why the hidden sale outraged them more than ordinary bad ownership might have. Conflict of interest reads as a kind of pollution, a stain that spreads through a newsroom by what reporters learn not to test. The resignation reads as an act of purification, a man removing himself from a tainted house. The grammar is clean and it is satisfying, and it carries a strain the set rarely names.
The strain runs through the money. The guild preaches independence from the wealthy and lives on the wealthy’s gifts. The Nevada Independent is a nonprofit funded by donors and foundations, and the same is true across much of the surviving local press. The men who afflict the comfortable draw salaries that comfortable people underwrite. Critics seize on this. A local antagonist has run a site for years calling Smith arrogant and reading his little people letter as contempt dressed up as virtue. The charge is hostile and self-interested, yet it points at a real seam. The hero who scorns the blowhard billionaire still needs a patron, and the patron is rarely poor. The guild holds its independence as an essence while depending, in practice, on arrangements that complicate it. That gap between the creed and the ledger is the place to watch, and it is the place the set’s own moral grammar gives it the least language to discuss.