For news-loving Southern Nevadans, the name Andrew Kiraly is synonymous with “local voice.” The born-and-raised Las Vegan has been a prominent writer and editor here for more than three decades. Kiraly left Nevada Public Radio in 2022, and now he’s leaving Las Vegas altogether. He talked with Desert Companion editor-at-large Scott Dickensheets about his time in the local news business, and where he predicts that business is headed.
Kiraly’s career began in 1992 at the early alt-weekly, Las Vegas New Times. He also worked for the Las Vegas Mercury and Las Vegas CityLife before becoming editor of our own Desert Companion magazine in 2010. In 2022, he created the events newsletter The List, and he currently works as the opinion editor of The Nevada Independent, a job he says he'll continue remotely.
But before all that, Kiraly was, as he put it, a "skate punk zine entrepreneur." He recalled, "The thing I loved about publishing zines was it just gave me limitless creative latitude to try different things. ... So it did that, but it also gave me a really strong appreciation for a publication as a whole thing unto itself, as far as being an expression of design, photography and great writing, as opposed to separating all those things and thinking about them individually."
Over his years working in local journalism, Kiraly has seen (and been involved in) many huge milestones. The 1989 formation of a joint operating agreement between the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Las Vegas Sun "kind of presaged, to me, a lot of the troubles that were going to face print journalism, ahead of the age of the internet," he said. "And then the '90s, the alt-weekly boom, which I think for Vegas, was really important ... That was a moment where there was this collective recognition of Vegas as a place that could actually have an identity that was sort of framed by themes and issues and topics that characterized Southern Nevada in a unique way. And then that all went away, because of the advent of the internet."
As far as the media's future goes, Kiraly says he's a "desperate optimist," who believes "we're going to pass through a very dark age of misinformation" fueled by algorithmically tailored news feeds supercharged by AI. "I think we're going to come to a series of like a fairly cataclysmic events that are going to be born of this misinformation atmosphere that we've created," he said. "And I'm hopeful that through that, people will come to appreciate traditional journalism that's factually based, that's informationally sound, that is written in good faith."
There are many things that Kiraly will miss, including, he said, both the "totalized atmosphere of spectacle" that is The Strip and its counter-balance of local arts and culture, with its "recalcitrant insurgent energy." What won't he miss? "I wish that Vegas's desire to be this, you know, magnetic, international tourist destination wouldn't always come at the cost of locals," he said. "I also wish that there was just sort of like some moment where we could stop and think about the actual physical development of our city, and get to a place where it's not just strip mall suburb, strip mall suburb."
Guest: Andrew Kiraly, opinion editor, The Nevada Independent
