★★★ The keys from the pocket of yesterday’s jeans were cold from having lain on the floor. People outside were hunched and bundled. On the roof deck of the new luxury building, a photography crew, well-layered, was shooting a model in pale yellow summerwear, a lightweight skirt and sleeveless top. Between shots they wrapped a maroon blanket around her. The clouds were well spaced but densely built, cutting the sun on and off, and when it came back on, the model’s golden hair shone. The wool coat came out of the closet, and the wool hat could have. The bank thermometer said 47. Leaves and litter swirled.

Amazon has posted an aggressive response to the “everyone at Amazon is miserable but also paid well but also crying all the time” story in the New York Times. That story was published 64 days ago, which, according to my proprietary productivity algorithm, works out to about 21 words per day. This will presumably be addressed in Jay Carney’s next performance review. (Manager’s notes: “Although a second post on the same day was a step in the right direction!”)

There are two particularly effective parts of the post. One is the revelation that the source of the story’s most memorable quote — “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk” — was provided by a former employee that had, according to Amazon, “attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records.” Questions about whether or not Amazon should discuss personnel matters like this are at least somewhat offset by this ex-employee’s choice to publicly engage the company in the Times. Less clear is the necessity, later, to discuss the particulars of an employee’s performance review and promotion in additional detail:

Chris Brucia, who recalls how he was berated in his performance review before being promoted, also was given a written review. Had the Times asked about this, we would have shared what it said. “Overall,” the document reads, “you did an outstanding job this past performance year.” Mr. Brucia was given exceptionally high ratings and then promoted to a senior position.

This doesn’t contradict the report at all: Brucia’s claim that he was berated in his performance review before getting a promotion is answered by pointing out the existence of a separate, written review that contains a positive sentence. It is insinuation about character constructed as a rebuttal. The Times, much more quickly than Amazon, disputed both that account and the terms of the former ex-employee’s departure.

The other section that will garner the most sympathy for Amazon is probably the email sent to Amazon by reporter Jodi Kantor in which she says she would like to “convey that this story will express that Amazon has a somewhat counterintuitive theory of management that really works,” among other assuring things. The Times, in its response-to-the-response, characterized this differently than Amazon as well, and I think its defense — that Amazon “always assumed this was going to be a tough story” — is both a fair assessment and useless in countering the queasy impression given by the email.

Then again, I’m sympathetic to, or at least familiar with, her position. It’s a common one: You’re writing a story about a powerful company, which is giving you some degree of access; the company gets a sense that the piece won’t paint a purely positive picture of everything the company is doing; the PR person, whose job it is to manage the company’s representation in media, threatens to back out or actively work against you; you try to assure them, without lying, that you may be critical but that you’ll be fair. There’s a subtle but strong case against access journalism contained in these types of emails, particularly as publications lose the leverage they once had in their unique and captive audiences. They’re interactions between an individual intent on telling stories that a company wouldn’t tell about itself and a representative of that company charged with making sure that doesn’t happen. What’s difficult about these particular emails is embedded in sender and recipient. Amazon is clearly the more powerful party and is approached as such, with a sort of ends-justify-the-means utility. This might not square with most readers’ ideas of what should motivate a newspaper story about a company they see as vaguely large and problematic but immediately useful. It’s hard to ignore, however, that the man on the other side of the exchanges is a former White House press secretary.

Anyway. This story and its aftermath represent a bit of a trap, particularly in discussions on Twitter: If you think the original story contained both valuable information and flaws, your default position is to go to bat for the Times; if you read this story as a portrait of a tough workplace written to cast it in the worst possible light, but acknowledge that it contained some worrying anecdotes, then your tendency will be to defend Amazon.

But these too reveal themselves as proxy positions. It’s not story versus story, or publication versus tech company. It’s media versus tech. That’s the context within which this story was conceived, written, read and disputed. Carney engages with this idea directly:

In any story, there are matters of opinion and there are issues of fact. And context is critical. Journalism 101 instructs that facts should be checked and sources should be vetted. When there are two sides of a story, a reader deserves to know them both. Why did the Times choose not to follow standard practice here?

Here we have the flack defining “standard practice” for journalism and claiming that the New York Times has not followed it. The post concludes with a passage seemingly intended to inoculate readers against all future reporting by the paper (or anyone else!):

The Times got attention for their story, but in the process they did a disservice to readers, who deserve better. The next time you see a sensationalistic quote in the Times like “nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk”, you might wonder whether there’s a crucial piece of context or backstory missing — like admission of fraud — and whether the Times somehow decided it just wasn’t important to check.

Here the trap reveals itself again. It’s tempting to say, hey, Jay Carney, shut up, you’re a highly paid PR person representing a giant retail company after a damaging story, you’re the last person who should be Telling Us How Journalism Is And Should Be. Or to say, in the spirit of his own post, just stick to the facts. But then you find yourself defending… not questioning stories? A particular reporter that you don’t know, or a company that you don’t work at? Or an entire industry, because you’re loyal to it? Or because you share a common enemy?

Allow me some anecdotal observations from the middle of a strange conflict. In recent years, but in the last year especially, the public relationship between what we can vaguely describe as “tech” and loosely define as the news “media” seems to have deteriorated dramatically. Some journalists rightly recognize that companies like Amazon are fast becoming the most important and powerful companies in the world, and their response is to treat reporting on them and criticizing them as an urgent project of our time. This is a predictable development and arguably a good one: If the role of a reporter is to uncover truthful stories about powerful people or organizations that are motivated to hide or minimize them, and that play major roles in readers’ daily lives, then what worthier subject than an Amazon or a Google? At the same time, journalists have developed a more personally antagonistic relationship with tech companies as their own companies and professions entered into their direct competition. Amazon is aligned with an axis of companies that regard, in theory and in practice, media distribution models as inefficient and out of date. These companies have demonstrated their correctness through the market, which is good enough for them: Amazon is winning against traditional book publishers; online publishers are either necessarily working with or being quickly marginalized by platforms like Facebook.

The rise of these platforms has corresponded with chaos and decline and confusion in the industry that covers them. These companies are not just subjects but business partners and, ultimately, rivals; this conflict has corresponded with and perhaps followed from voluntary but necessary partnerships. We engage them not just at eye level but at every other level, too. To pretend that we’re collectively and individually above this is ridiculous.

Meanwhile, perhaps sensing this attitude, tech companies have become impatient with the press as it exists today. A press it no longer needs as much to “tell its story.” And a press which of course, as always, produces a lot of garbage alongside the work it’s more proud of. Consider this Medium (lol again!) post from Blake Ross, former Director of Product at Facebook, about the failure to do some fairly straightforward reporting on the herbal supplement implicated in reports on Lamar Odom’s recent hospitalization. He matched an old domain registration with some newer ones, which led him to some email addresses, which led him to someone at least worth asking about selling the pills. He shows his work. It’s embarrassing for every publication mentioned, evidence of both lazy aggregation and, probably, coverage produced out of need to have something on the site rather than the desire to advance a story.

But the stated lessons of the post are fascinating. It starts:

One of the most useful lessons I learned from working at Facebook had nothing to do with technology: Doubt the media. Always doubt the media. Many journalists are superb, but certain reporters would publish plainly inaccurate information about our products on a regular basis. And if they got our tech wrong, what were they getting wrong in that science story? That war piece?

I know the media’s coverage of Facebook, its partner-competitor-savior-killer, must be frustrating from to read from the inside, and that it is quite often wrong; I’ve spoken at length with people who work there, whose grievances are specific and sometimes sympathetic but which, of course, are broadly and obviously remedied by the company’s continued dominance (which is one reason they’re so rarely articulated in public). I also know that a lot of this poor coverage results from uncomfortable stories that attempt to balance limited access with a desire to say something new.

But this post takes us to a strange place by the end:

That is, in fact, the entire point of this post: Don’t outsource your thinking. Not to the government, not to the media, not to me. Confront the world skeptically, particularly in realms like supplements, where organizations we lean on for oversight may sometimes abdicate their responsibility. Educate yourself until alarm bells ring in your mind when you read observation masquerading as journalism. We are lucky to live in a time when we are all so empowered.

Yes, be skeptical. Of course! This has always been true, and it’s hard to disagree with, just as it’s hard to disagree with Jay Carney when he says we shouldn’t take quotations as perfectly representative of the truth just because the appear in the New York Times. This is a healthy reflexive response to new information — journalistic, even. It’s the kind of mindset that might also lead someone to question the public proclamations of a Facebook or an Amazon. It is a case for reporting made against the industry that purports to do it, wielded by people whose interests are, or have been, clearly aligned against it. “We are lucky to live in a time when we are all so empowered” is held forth alongside a characterization of the media as just another dumb ill-incentivized power motivated by its own perpetuation, like the government. (Or, as it does not say, a dominant tech company.)

It’s a disorienting state of affairs! Perhaps it will become clearer as the tech industry becomes more vocal and thorough in its dismissal of the press, and as the press splits between a more compliant, successful and captured component and an increasingly marginalized and aggressive one. The emergence of a more purely oppositional press might preclude the sort of muddiness captured in Kantor’s email — this necessity to both work with and possibly against the interests of your powerful subjects. A press that has been forced to give up all the benefits of access — a press more narrowly interested in alternative narratives — would be easier to get behind and harder to attack. It would also be a lot smaller, and I doubt it would make much money. But who knows! Maybe it’ll look so unfamiliar we won’t recognize it for a while. These are the kinds of problems that don’t so much get solved as they get reasoned out of existence.

In any case, an Amazon story written with no access at all might result in a more straightforward debate: Amazon would dispute the Times account, and vice-versa, and so on, and it would at least be clear who is speaking, and what about. Any denouncement of the entire reporting project would in that context seem much more clearly motivated. Carney couldn’t cry betrayal. The Times could push back against the pushing-back without getting sidetracked by existential issues.

But maybe it’s all a bit bigger than that. There’s blood in the water. Tech knows it’s winning. It no longer seems unreasonable to suggest that the press, as it exists today, could be demolished and replaced with something very different. Tech will become bolder in its denouncements of the preexisting press; the press will return the favor, maybe. Or just clown itself to an early grave! For the time being, the market favors one outcome; the networks through which it will come to pass resemble this market; the means of production blah blah, attention, something. Every dispute over the particulars of a news story, or the way it is distributed, eventually arrives here, in this big enormous mess.

And maybe it’s all just simpler than that, too. The most illuminating comment on the Amazon affair came from Hacker News, which, as a meeting place for tech workers, is generally skeptical of tech coverage and the media in general.

It’s actually weird to see a company firing back this publicly, releasing performance data (no matter if positive or negative) on previous employees, and it all being posted not by the CEO or a HR VP, but by the head of PR.

Edit: Not only it smells of whitewashing, but it also looks deceptive.

Here we have distrust of Amazon. But the writer, not being a journalist, doesn’t default to a defense of the original story, or of the Times, or of the media. We end up somewhere else completely:

And PR? Seriously? Not only it’s a sleazy piece, but Amazon chose the worst possible position to convey the message. Get some engineer, accountant, designer, heck, get the HR intern who just joined 2 weeks ago to talk about this.

It would have more credibility than a PR person who’s been in the company for less than one year.

This is tech’s trump card: A rejection of the stories it explicitly tells about itself are still an endorsement of the stories told by its success. (This is an especially powerful effect with the industry in a state of constant growth — it seems to have the whole world in front of it.)

See also this response health-technology startup Theranos posted after a harsh Wall Street Journal story:

The sources relied on in the article today were never in a position to understand Theranos’ technology and know nothing about the processes currently employed by the company. We are disappointed that, in an effort to make its story more dramatic, this reporter relied only on the views of four “anonymous” disgruntled former employees, competitors and their allies, instead of reaching out to many of the scientific, health care and business leaders who have actually seen, tested, used and examined our breakthrough technologies.

This, again, doesn’t dwell on the specifics of the story for long before suggesting that the entire project was doomed from the beginning. (The journo/VC response to this much narrower and weirder story can be observed in part here.) If only we’d heard from an engineer, a keeper of facts, a custodian of objective reality.

Or as Erik Hinton put more concisely:

Tech lords aren’t concerned about protecting their image. They want journalists to give up their control of ontology, their model of truth.

— Rose Ghoul’d Erik (@erikhinton) October 19, 2015

@erikhinton They need truth to be some quantified externality, meted out by data, fit, predicted and manicured by their code.

— Rose Ghoul’d Erik (@erikhinton) October 19, 2015

Perhaps this is an over-broad diagnosis, but it seems worth nudging out into the open. Consider: The old moguls bought newspapers (some still do). But now I’d argue there’s no need. Why buy the media when you can simply become its context, its location, and its system of incentives? The users will take care of the rest.

“Canada is a country constantly defined by opposition. Often (almost always) this opposing contrast comes from America, a neighbour close enough to cast a country-wide shadow. Canada, as seen from America, is an eerily similar counterpart, close enough for scrutiny but not far enough for perspective: either a nearby nirvana or a malevolent microcosm. The promise of our cheerfully praised globally recognized political characteristics, such as socialized healthcare or Drake, suggests a welcome respite from what are America’s less-favourable globally recognized characteristics — the cynicism, the capitalism, the crushing pursuit of no less than complete control.”
 — I guess something is happening in Canada? You can learn more here.

If you have lived so long that you remember when “Tom’s Diner” came out — if you are ancient enough even to remember, say, your grandmother getting upset when William Holden died — reading that the song “is over 30 years old” is not going to come as a shock, exactly, but it’s not going to make you real happy either. If you are younger than that, good for you. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Can I recommend some ancient history that might teach you about a world long since vanished?

In a lot of ways this is a city built on Pretend. We pretend that we aren’t getting older, that we can still be out until four in the morning and it won’t be any different when we wake up than it was in our early 20s. We pretend that we have plenty of time to accomplish all the goals we think are still within our reach. We pretend that the careless ways we act and the carelessness with which we allow ourselves to be treated in turn are merely temporary stops on the way to the true happiness that we think is surely our reward for working so hard at the things we pretend make a difference or mean something. We pretend that everything is practice, everything is temporary, and that on the one day we finally decide we are ready to take ourselves seriously the world will stand up and applaud and say, “At last! Have anything you want, it’s no less than what you deserve!” If we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror as we pass by we pretend that we don’t see the wrinkles, the hard-set eyes, the dents and dings and damage and decay that the years of hard living have chipped out of us, the sad and addled residue that is the inevitable result of what can only be characterized as a toxic lifestyle. But most of all we pretend that everything we eat here hasn’t been touched by vermin at some point. Because as rough as all the other stuff is, you can probably cope with it if you really have to, but there’s no way to get by if you are forced to acknowledge just how much anything you come into contact with has been all rubbed up on by rats. Now let’s never talk about it again.

It’s Monday morning, it’s cold (at least for another 24 hours until it turns back to summer again, so enjoy figuring out how to layer), the Internet is already intolerable and we’re right in the center of that gap where we’re not quite sure how bad the week is going to be and actually finding out. It’s hard to get motivated is what I’m saying. I’ll give you a choice today: You can go for the Chairlift above (I’m nowhere near sold, but enough of the people I respect are telling me that it’s awesome that I have to believe the problem is with me; maybe I still resent them — and Apple — for squatting in my ear with “Bruises” way back in 2008) or you can do some classic Mogwai. Either way, enjoy. It’s gonna be one of those weeks, huh?

Soon the subject of NEW YORK IN THE ’70s will belong solely to the historians and the fictional scenarists, as participants in the actual events of the era finally die off or find something else to talk about (I know which one I’m betting on). It won’t be the greatest tragedy in the world — how many times can you hear those grizzled anecdotists whose last moment of cultural relevance happened four decades previously dribble out the same stories of cheap rent and money carried in socks to avoid muggings and the amazing freedom of the downtown scene, man? — but as the past becomes even more gauzy and appealing through lack of mundane detail, it’s nice to see a few correctives that point out that it wasn’t all boundary-pushing performance art in disused parking lots and skinny kids with smack habits playing punk at CBGBs while the Son of Sam set cars on fire during the blackout to celebrate a Yankees World Series win. Sometimes it was a bunch of guys eating leftover matzo in an Upper East Side apartment as they discussed municipal insolvency.

★★★★ Blue from the sky reflected in the pan of the stovetop like the light of a gas flame accidentally left on. The man sleeping on a bench in the forecourt had a tan blanket pulled over him, nearly as tidy as bedclothes. The sun was so bright it was almost possible to walk into the crossbar of a scaffold, lost in the shadow line. Here was the new season. It seemed safe at last to wash the stale old jeans and the brand-new ones and hang them up to dry. The air was chilly through the windows but fresh enough to put up with.

“BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR BABY Twitter wasn’t as bad as WHY IS YOUR TV THERE Twitter. And neither group comes close to CHARGE YOUR PHONE BATTERY Twitter. CHARGE YOUR PHONE Twitter is the worst.”

by Mae Rice

When you walk down the Strip in Las Vegas, as roughly 18,000 people do every hour, here are some things you will notice: endless dinging, blooping, and victory noises coming from the casinos; dudes from the Midwest in aseasonal Mardi Gras beads; an ocean of neon; and people clustered on the sidewalk, handing out cards with topless women on them. In 2012, the last time I was in Vegas, these card-hawkers worked unsmilingly until well past midnight, slapping their top cards against their decks. Otherwise, they didn’t make a sound; in my decade-plus as a Vegas tourist, I’ve never heard them speak. The loudest thing about them, really, is their neon t-shirts, which say “GIRLS DIRECT TO YOU 20 MINUTES” in giant block letters.

These people, known as handbillers, advertise for Vegas escort services, or as officials call them, “outcall promoters.” “Outcall” means the businesses send their escorts (or, occasionally, strippers) on calls, rather than having customers come to them. “Promoter” means that they focus on advertising. Exhibit A: the cards handbillers hand out.

They are, just barely, not obscene, because the models’ nipples are obscured by Clip Art stars or glowing fog. They feature minimal text: a first name like “Tawny,” a phone number, a URL, a price under $100, and a few phrases like “full service” and “no hidden fees.” But $100 for what? What is “partial service”? I’ve never seen anyone ask a handbiller these questions. I’ve never seen anyone speak to a handbiller.

According to a Stephen Franklin piece that appeared in the Chicago Tribune, most handbillers are undocumented workers from Central and South America. One told Franklin that he received $40 for a 10-hour shift, paid in cash at the end of the night, with “no forms to fill out, and no questions asked.” Outcall promoters didn’t even seem to track their handbillers’ names, and the mystique was mutual; most handbillers didn’t know who they worked for.

“What else can I do?” a different handbiller asked Franklin. “I need [immigration] papers and I do not have any. I have three children here. […] We need money.”

In a world of cheap online ads, it’s odd that outcall promoters continue to pay for handbillers. Then again, I’m a modern Vegas tourist, and living proof that they still generate interest. In my quest to find out why they’re still fixtures of the Strip, I irritated stonewalling people, spoke with David Hasselhoff’s publicist, and called more than fifty outcall promoters. Handbillers clearly hooked me.

In the ’90s, Clark County banned handbillers. They were threats to public safety, and geysers of litter. Lieutenant Todd Raybuck, who has been involved in policing on the Strip for more than 20 years, said handbillers used to “form lines across the sidewalk, almost cordons or walls of individuals… probably the easiest way to describe it is a gauntlet.” To avoid them, some tourists would step into traffic. The ones who remained on the sidewalk were problematic, too. They would take handbillers’ cards blindly, then look at them and drop them in disgust, creating an issue the AP called “X-rated litter.”

Outcall promoters S.O.C. and Hillsboro Enterprises — owned by Richard Soranno and Vincent Bartello, respectively — fought the handbiller ban in court. Allen Lichtenstein, the ACLU general counsel at the time, assisted them, and explained the stakes of the case like this: If outcall promoters were trying to advertise in the pre-internet era, “their options were fairly limited.” They weren’t allowed to advertise in hotels, and “it took them years to get into the phone book, back when phone books were important.” They were fighting for their best available marketing strategy.

From a YouTube video titled ‘Las Vegas Card Snappers DURING THE DAY’

Overall, Vegas outcall promoters have remarkable luck with the law. Prostitution is illegal in Clark County, and the Las Vegas Police Department runs a steady stream of stings on escorts that rarely end well; a LVPD detective made a recent, general complaint that, while escort services claims they only offer private nude dances, they really “depend on prostitution as their main source of income.” Only the escorts themselves get punished for this, though. To work with outcall promoters, they sign independent contractor agreements, in which they promise not to solicit prostitution; this clears the promoters of responsibility if, or really when, prostitution takes place. (The legal system has helped the outcall industry in another way, too: In 1998, the FBI saved Soranno and Bartello from a New York mob assassin called Vinnie Aspirins, whose preferred weapon was the power drill.)

The handbiller case was no exception to the outcall promoters’ luck. The outcall promoters beat the ban. According to Lichtenstein, it was an overbroad ordinance to begin with. In an effort to get rid of handbillers who advertised for escorts, the county had in fact banned all “off-premises canvassing” in tourist centers; in other words, it had banned “handing out, on the public sidewalk, any material that had any advertising at all… even The New York Times,” Lichtenstein said. This meant he could beat the ordinance with a simple First Amendment argument. Sidewalks, he argued, are public forums, even when casinos own the land below them. Whatever people and businesses want to say on sidewalks, then — including “[pictures of boobs]” — is constitutionally protected speech.

After Lichtenstein and the outcall promoters’ initial success in court, revised versions of the ordinance continued to crop up for a decade. They were always struck down for the same First Amendment reasons as the first one, though. The law simply couldn’t beat handbilling, and so far, neither can the internet. I’ve heard, anecdotally, that there are fewer handbillers now than there were in the ’90s, but it’s hard to tell. Their headcount fluctuates with tourism. Whether it’s the peak season or not, though, you can always find handbillers on the Strip.

The information that handbillers hand out doesn’t help explain their presence. The URLS on their cards led me to websites full of full-frontal nudity, several of which looked like untouched artifacts from the ’90s. On one, the escort pictures were small and mugshot-like; on another, now updated, the stab at SEO was an unpunctuated swamp of keywords at the bottom of the page. The modern ones had design problems of their own. The higher-res pictures really showed the effort in the women’s expressions, the facial muscles holding up their flirty smiles. None of the sites mentioned handbillers.

So-called ‘X-rated litter’

The phone numbers on handbillers’ cards were similarly unhelpful, although they did lead me to one receptionist who was willing to talk. She explained that the escorts don’t just do nude dances; sometimes, at football events, they put on mini-jerseys and served hot dogs. She told me that if customers tipped generously enough, escorts might go the extra mile and, say, “put on a grass skirt and dance around.” She knew of two escorts whose clients had bought them Bentleys. As far as handbillers were concerned, though, she only knew that she wished their cards were more tasteful. “I get a lot of prank phone calls,” she said. “Teenage kids, they’re very explicit and rude to me.”

Luckily, there’s a way to reach outcall promoters without relying on their cards: an online government database, publicly accessible, that lists every licensed Vegas business. It’s obviously the product of bureaucracy, full of vaguely-named categories like “Personal Services” and “Retail — Group 1.” Looking through all the outcall promoters in the database (separated into two categories for no reason), I stumbled on some excellent business names: Adults Only!!!, Lipstixxx, T&A Entertainment, and my favorite, Bestkeptsecrets. In an on-brand turn of events, Bestkeptsecrets was one of two outcall promoters with no listed number.

When I started trying the numbers, a curt receptionist answered my first call; her company, Companions, didn’t use handbillers. After her, I kept making calls during business hours; still, I somehow reached a long string of voicemails. Often, they wouldn’t let me leave a message. “Try back later,” one said before the line went silent. “No routes found,” said another. The most frustrating one said “Leave a message,” but there was no follow-up beep.

The rare people who did answer hung up on me, told me I had a wrong number, or explained, sweetly, that they were “just a secretary.” If I asked the secretary to put me on with her manager, she — always she — reiterated that she was just a secretary.

Finally, though, an owner answered the phone himself. He told me that he only advertised online, and never used handbillers. Did I think he should, though? His business was losing money.

Like most outcall promoters, he described his business as a “referral service.” His income came from handling marketing for escorts, and matching them with clients. Outcall promoters usually do this in exchange for a “show-up fee” — the sum clients pay by phone to guarantee their escort shows up for her appointment. Escorts sometimes get a cut of this fee, but they’re paid primarily in tips.

The man was adamant that his escorts weren’t prostitutes. His company didn’t directly oversee them while they worked, but if he heard of an escort having sex with customers, he’d terminate her contract. “Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m not making any money,” he said. “I don’t know.”

I reached another owner, too, the only one who used a full name on his company voicemail: Albert Meranto. (While tracking down Meranto, I discovered a LinkedIn profile in his name, written almost entirely in scene and full of cameos from David Hasselhoff. An excerpt:

During the course of that first meeting [in 1996, at a nightclub Meranto ran], Mr. Hasselhoff said to Mr. Meranto: “Al, you have finer women here than we have on the beaches of Malibu”. When Mr. Meranto replied: “David, my girls are not only finer looking, but they love to play with “whales” and will swallow more than salt water”, an almost immediate bond was formed between them.

Meranto wouldn’t confirm he made the LinkedIn profile, but did say he knows David Hasselhoff; Hasselhoff’s publicist said he’d never heard of Meranto.)

Meranto’s been in the outcall industry for decades, and currently advertises through a mix of websites and paid referrals from cab drivers, limo drivers, and hotel concierges. When I asked him if he’d ever consider using handbillers, he said, “Never in a million years. That’s not my style of client… I wish they would stop that, because it degrades Vegas.”

I never reached Bartello, the owner of Hillsboro Enterprises. He’s one of handbillers’ primary, or at least best-documented, employers. If there’s a secret to handbillers’ longevity, besides that they make money, he’s most likely to know it. Not that his public persona suggests a man with secrets. On his Instagram, he clarifies that he’s kidding after each one of his jokes, tags pictures of his family with “#love,” and expresses enthusiasm for flashy cars, girls who go commando, and his own bare chest. His Instagram is a microcosm of Vegas, really — so much basicness and bravado, you can’t tell if there’s anything important underneath. You’re just always wondering. Keeping you wondering is the point.

Eventually, I reached a guy with something approaching a reason for handbillers’ longevity. He did outcall promoter marketing, but his company didn’t use handbillers. Instead, like Meranto’s businesses, they relied on paid referrals and websites.

Online advertising, this guy explained, isn’t as simple as it sounds. His company has about a hundred active websites. “We use different [ones] to target different keywords,” he explained. The sheer quantity of escort sites creates problems, though. It’s hard to get one surfaced by a search engine; in fact, the online landscape is so competitive that some escort sites have been using stripper keywords, even though escorts and strippers have different job. (Escorts do one-on-one work, while strippers only do group events.) This keyword overstepping has actual stripper services in a huff.

I asked him how the ancient-looking sites I’d encountered could exist in this climate. He said that they likely belong to Hillsboro Enterprises. “They’re terrible at web design,” he said. “Hillsboro, they’re a dinosaur. But they’re a powerful dinosaur. They do things the old school way.”

In other words, they advertise via handbiller. Maybe handbilling survives because it’s an escape from the SEO grind. It’s a way to avoid choosing between nearly-identical keywords like “Vegas escort” and “Vegas escorts” — two of the industry’s most hotly contested search terms, he said.

Handbilling also survives because Clark County made peace with it, finally. In 2011, officials abandoned the handbiller ban once and for all, and struck a “voluntary agreement” about handbiller conduct with the outcall promoters. As law, it would have been a First Amendment violation, but it was only law-adjacent. The Las Vegas Review-Journal recapped its main points:

Key rules of conduct include staying 20 feet away from crosswalks, not giving any material to people who look younger than 25, refraining from snapping the cards or pamphlets, whistling or making any other noise, picking up litter and handing out material to tourists’ torsos instead of their faces.

Modern handbillers are even less obtrusive than these rules make them sound, too, thanks to Clark County’s new No Obstruction Zones. Meant to prevent pedestrian traffic jams in tourist districts, they work a lot like no-parking zones, shifting from active to inactive based on pedestrian volume and the time of day. Lt. Raybuck, who helps police the Strip, said that handbillers who work in active zones can get anything from a verbal warning to fines and jail time. It’s an arrangement that can be read as a success. Handbillers are finally under control, from the county’s perspective, and Lt. Raybuck said he and his officers have encountered a few thirty-, forty-, and fifty-time violators of the No Obstruction Zone ordinance. Punishments can’t be too severe.

At the same time, the new agreements and laws create new ways for handbillers to irk the police, which reinforces a decades-old status quo. The outcall industry has always existed on the edge of legality, and its leaders have always outsourced its risks to escorts and handbillers, people with less clout and fewer options. People who will take it.

Photos by Daedrius and KayVee.INC