The utter deconstruction of the momentarily Pulitzer-caliber reporting staff of the Las Vegas Sun continues in earnest this week with another batch of crucial departures:* Michael Mishak, the sole Vegas-based political writer left in the stable, is off to Sacramento to the L.A. Times' California statehouse bureau. Mishak was supposed to head to Washington D.C. to take over the paper's capital bureau for Lisa Mascaro, who left last month for the Times' D.C. bureau. With Mascaro and Mishak gone as well as Patrick Coolican (off to the L.A. Weekly after the June 8 primary), that leaves just David McGrath Schwartz in Carson City and nobody in Vegas with any history to cover the critical Reid-v-Whoever race.
* Alex Richards, the paper's key computer-assisted reporting expert, is off to the Chronicle of Higher Education very soon. That means bye-bye to substantive data analysis for a while.
* Stephanie Tavares, an environment reporter, is off to law school in Vermont. Her husband, the extremely amusing Brendan Buhler, was one of the 37 who lost their jobs in the Greenspun Media's Great Purge.
* Joe Brown, formerly a culture writer for the Sun who moved to be a writer/editor at the Las Vegas Weekly amid the Great Purge, is leaving the magazine and the city.
There are two ways to look at this. First, the past year has seen the largest en masse elevation of Vegas journalists to important national publications in the shortest period of time I've ever seen. It's a testament to what the Sun has been, at least for the past several years, that these opportunities are coming to these young, hungry journalists. Now's the time to snap up some new whippersnappers with potential and do it all again, to see if lightning can strike twice.
But the timing just could not be worse. The entire political team vanishing in arguably the most important political year in Nevada history? Add education scribe Emily Richmond's departure for eight months or so to Michigan for a fellowship starting in August and they're also without their ace heading into two other critical events, the selection of a new superintendent and the fiscal bloodbath that will be the state's 2011 Legislative session.
It's an honor that we've had reporters serving this city who get to bounce on to such cool stuff, but for them all to be doing so at the same time leaves the stable depleted. The R-J's political staff does their jobs well, but what I've enjoyed in recent years about the two newspapers is that the Sun can cede some of the day-to-day to the R-J and yield some insightful yarns and sophisticated analysis. It's hard to imagine who's going to be providing that analysis now.
